Darby day

Rhys Darby’s first great opportunity to take stock of his career came on the set of Richard Curtis’ 2009 film The Boat That Rocked, just as he started drowning. Call it method acting, but when the cameras finished rolling on the Kiwi’s flailing-in-the-ocean scene, he began sinking for real and divers rushed to drag him from the sea’s clammy embrace. So did his life flash before his eyes?

“Well, almost. It was very quick and I’ve achieved so much!” he jokes. “I was exhausted as they were pulling me back towards the boat, I remember gasping for air, trying to get my head out of the water, all the while thinking ‘God, what I do for art!’” An immensely likeable, physically gifted performer with a wonderful line in sound effects, art and fortune have largely colluded since he played hapless band manager Murray Hewitt in the celebrated New York hipster sitcom Flight of the Conchords.

Residing in Beverley Hills last year, working on How To Be A Gentleman- another US sitcom rather than a long, hard look at himself- the 38 year-old started to reflect on what transplanted him and his family to the other side of the world. The natural disasters in Christchurch and Fukushima were on his mind as he began writing his memoir This Way To Spaceship – part autobiography, part practical manual for surviving the forthcoming apocalypse by sneaking onto a secret intergalactic vessel. Featuring eccentric dance and fashion tips. It also channelled his joy at “a little Kiwi boy” sneaking into the Hollywood Dream Factory.

After starring alongside his hero Jim Carrey in the movie Yes Man, bonding over a shared plan to buy jetpacks, he went on to play the romantic lead in two independent films. Which, admittedly, sank like Rhys Darby trying to simulate drowning. He doesn’t dwell, too long, on his second son’s birth which saw him having to pull out of the Steve Carrell film Dinner For Schmucks, a role that propelled IT Crowd star Chris O’Dowd to bigger things Stateside. From the start, it was Darby that afforded Murray his unshakeable, “naïve optimism that I’m going to make it and everything’s going to be ok.“

"As long as you believe in yourself, put your blinkers on and don’t worry about any of the negativity, then the nice guy finishes first instead of last” he declares. A sometime soldier who, in the words of Eddie Izzard, always preferred the “running, jumping, climbing trees” aspects of the army—the camaraderie, the adventuring and the uniform, rather than being a human killing machine—he forsook martial life but has otherwise stuck to his guns. “If there were VIP spaceships, I wouldn’t get on one. But I’d be close enough to know about them, infiltrate them and tell all my friends about it. At least, that’s the whole crux of this stage show I’ve put together.”

Adapted from the book, and featuring performances of his patented dance moves like ‘Paper Delivery Boy’ and ‘Feed The Chicken!’, his latest Fringe offering won the FRED Award for Best Show at this year’s New Zealand International Comedy Festival. It includes all his characteristic cartoonish excess and “jumping around making helicopter noises”. But he's also matured: "It has a good narrative and a great combination of stand-up and theatre.” Interviewing Darby, you inevitably begin to share his producer wife Rosie’s character assessment- that he’s supremely confident without being arrogant. An endearing blend he attributes to being a New Zealander, “such a small country right down the bottom there, we feel we don’t really matter”, he suggests that he’s shy and a grafter.

Regardless, as a young comic, he would “joke about getting a limousine home or my helicopter landing on the roof”, telling the other standups that he had 14 other gigs to go to on any given night.  “It was all bollocks and everyone laughed,” he recalls, “but it meant that when things starting happening for me, they weren’t overly shocked.”

Throughout, he’s wondered if he’s smart or stupid, concluding both, leaving most of the practical thinking to Rosie. The couple have flown three other Kiwi acts over to Edinburgh, ebullient standup Chris Brain, musical misadventurer Munfred Bernstein and couch-based bromance, Square Eye Pair, echoing Murray’s role as New Zealand’s cultural attaché and securing babysitting for their two boys. After getting to know the Conchords, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, a decade ago in Edinburgh, Darby admits he doesn’t know what’s happening with the mooted film adaptation. And that there’s only been the one band meeting about it with all three “present”.

Nevertheless, unlike leggy blonde IT support staff, gliding by on photocopiers, “it’s a real dream. I think it will happen.” In the meantime, he’s developing his own screenplay, details of which remain top secret. Except that it has “a New Zealander taking on the world-type theme!”