Jemaine Clement is as soon as once more getting ready to embrace what he calls his dreaded “writer’s body.”
After a self-imposed writing hiatus, the New Zealand multihyphenate — arguably nonetheless finest recognized with Bret McKenzie as one half of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords — is able to return to the shadows of the darkish workplace and the fears of the clean web page. He has a TV mission arrange — a comedy sci-fi collection, “which I’m not allowed to say anything about,” that he’ll start writing “as soon as the deal gets done.”
However earlier than he places pen to paper, Clement is bracing for the unwanted side effects. Writing, he admits, does a quantity on him. “For writer-performers, there’s your acting body, and there’s your writing body,” he explains. “When I’m writing, my skin’s like gray, I put on weight. It’s totally different. With acting, only the first day is stressful. Writing is stressful all the time. I love it. But my writing body is a mess.”
Clement stepped away from writing after an intense, back-to-back stretch of TV initiatives, together with Wellington Paranormal, What We Do within the Shadows (the small-screen spin on his 2014 vampire mockumentary with Taika Waititi), and Apple TV’s Time Bandits. “It was too much,” he admits. “I only wrote the first two seasons of What We Do in the Shadows, but I was doing Wellington Paranormal at the same time. I’d have 10 episodes of one to rewrite or review, and six of the other. And neither producer cared that I was already running another show.”
After wrapping Time Bandits, Clement pivoted to the “much less stressful” work of performing. Lately, he’s performed marine biologist Dr. Garvin in James Cameron’s Avatar 2 and 3, taken on the position of tech billionaire Alton Appleton in M3GAN 2.0 (“I often get typecast as the professor or the scientist, the guy who does the exposition,” he jokes), and flexed his dramatic chops within the upcoming Disney+ “wrongcom” Alice and Steve, starring as a fifty-something man who falls right into a relationship together with his finest buddy’s far-younger daughter.
He’s additionally racked up a slate of high-profile voice roles: reprising Tamatoa for Disney’s live-action Moana, enjoying Owl Rex in Travis Knight’s stop-motion epic Wildwood, and returning because the purple prehistoric elephant Lou in Kiri and Lou Go Raaa!, the characteristic adaptation of New Zealand’s beloved preschool collection. Clement is at this 12 months’s Annecy Animation Pageant for the premiere of Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! and for Knight’s prolonged sneak peek of Wildwood.
“One thing I do prefer, acting in animation as opposed to live-action, is that in live-action I often imagine the character looking different, then when I watch it, it’s like ‘oh, it’s just me’,” he says. “But with animation, you look like you imagine. I’m the purple elephant!”
‘Kiri and Lou Go Raaa!’
Courtesy of Annecy Movie Pageant
Clement’s affection for kids’s animation extends past his personal initiatives, and he’s fast to put declare to one of many style’s largest up to date hits for his fellow Kiwis. “Well, Bluey is made in Australia,” he notes, “but the creators are also New Zealanders,” pointing to collection director Wealthy Jeffery and animator Mark Paterson. “We’ve done festivals together [with Kiri and Lou and Bluey] and it was a shock to me that they were from New Zealand. That’ll be a real scandal in Australia. It’s their biggest industry!”
Flight of the Conchords followers may also be completely satisfied to know that Clement’s current reunion with McKenzie —the duo did a brief run of live shows within the U.S. and New Zealand earlier this 12 months, their first performances in practically a decade — was not a one-off. “We’ve started new songs,” Clement confirms, “and we are talking about touring again for the first time in eight years. We didn’t have time to finish the new songs for our last show because we had to relearn the old ones.”
And those rumors of a Flight of the Conchords film? “I can’t promise anything, but the idea is not completely dead,” he says. “We talk about that every so often, but mostly we’re really a live act. We did the TV show, which of course was the biggest thing we’ve ever done, but we started off playing bars, and that feels like what [Flight of the Conchords] was designed to do.”
