Angela’s Ashes
New Zealand actress Angela Dotchin first came to the attention of Renaissance Pictures in 1998, when she was cast in the role of Soraya in the Xena episode Tsunami. Since then, she's notched up roles in Hercules, Young Hercules and, most significantly, Jack of All Trades in the lead role of Emilia. K. Stoddard Hayes meets the young and very talented actress...
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 20
In her first 10 years as an actress, Angela Dotchin has stacked up more accomplishments than some actors ever achieve.
She's been a regular in New Zealand's best-known soap, made guest appearances on two hit US television series, starred in a series of her own, and won New Zealand's Best Actress award. With all these successes, it's a surprise to hear that she became an actress by accident.
“When I was 17 I did modelling to get some extra money,” she recalls, “and I put down on my modelling card that I could act because I wanted to fill up the card. All of a sudden my modelling agent sent me along to an audition, and I got the part!” The role was in New Zealand's long-running soap Shortland Street.
“I got the role on a Friday and started work on the Monday,” Dotchin explains. “I’d never had an acting lesson in my life, so I didn't really know what I was doing! It was really, really scary. Everyone else had been in movies and was famous, but for me it was like going to acting university!”
After six years on Shortland Street, Dotchin felt she had learned all she could, and left to look for other roles and expand her acting experience. The very first job she won was the role of Soraya in the season three Xena: Warrior Princess episode Tsunami. Dotchin's first role for Renaissance Pictures was made memorable by the shooting conditions - the episode takes place on board a ship which is capsizing, so the cast spent almost the entire time up to their necks in water!
“It takes 10 or 12 days to shoot an episode, so we were like a bunch of prunes sitting in the water for two weeks!” Dotchin laughs. “Of course, because Lucy [Lawless] was in the water, the water was very warm! We kept saying, ‘Lucy, come and sit with us!’ But obviously they made it as comfortable for us as possible.”
Going from a soap opera to series television was an important step in Dotchin’s professional education. She recalls that watching Lawless and Renee O’Connor work was a lesson in itself. “They give such focus to their work that they really get things out of the script,” she says. “They don’t just read from the script, they keep pushing and pushing scene until it’s just fantastic. When I was (doing) fast turnaround television, it was like, ‘Quick! Spit the scene out! Next! Next scene!’ It was like that for six years. So acting in Xena meant that I could really appreciate the scenes for the first time.”
Tsunami also introduced Dotchin to her future Jack of All Trades co-star, Bruce Campbell, who played Autolycus in the episode. Like Lawless and O'Connor, Campbell impressed the young actress with his talent, professionalism and knowledge, and Dotchin relates how, years later, on the set of Jack All Trades, Campbell asked her what she had thought of him when they were shooting Tsunami. “I said, ‘Well, actually I was a little bit intimidated by you,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘What do you mean intimidated? What are you, crazy?’ The picture I have of working with him on Jack of All Trades was that he was just an absolute ball of laughter and fun so it’s quite funny looking back on that episode.”
Tsunami proved to be just the beginning of a long relationship with Renaissance Pictures. Not long after she completed the episode, Dotchin was asked to audition for the part of Nautica in Love on the Rocks, Hercules’ remake of The Little Mermaid. “Every girl in the world wants to be a mermaid,” says Dotchin, “so I couldn’t believe my luck when they chose me. I did two episodes - Love on the Rocks and My Best Girl’s Wedding - and I just had the best time! It was incredible working on that show.
Dotchin recalls what it was like as a young actress to be given the chance to work closely with one of New Zealand's biggest names: “Michael Hurst has been a big star in New Zealand since I was very young, and is an amazing theatre actor,” she enthuses. “It was a great privilege to work with him because he’s a bit of a legend in my circle of friends. He’s so energetic, loving and giving. We just had a ball together. He’s just a very ‘up’ person, and he’s got a lot of energy to give.”
Being a mermaid does have its drawbacks, however, such as having to wear a prosthetic tail. “It made going to the ladies a bit tricky!” Dotchin laughs. “I had to have somebody carry me around because I couldn’t walk. I was glued into the costume, which took a while to do. But it was very well made. It was pretty light, but it made me six foot tall when I had it on!”
Dotchin had more to do with her fishtail than just lie around in it. In one memorable scene in Love on the Rocks, she has to fight the bad guys. Swinging the tail around to knock over a stunt man was quite an effort for her stomach muscles. In other scenes, she had to swim and dive into the surf. “The problem was that the fishtail was rather buoyant,” she recalls, “so I had trouble diving under the water. The fishtail would push my face under the water and then I’d get a bit stuck! They had to actually tie my tail under the water with a rope and attach some sandbags, so it was a hilarious afternoon!”
Dotchin’s Hercules appearances were followed by a recurring part as Kora in Young Hercules. But instead of being the young actress, she got to play a more mature, big sister figure for the young leads. “I had loads of fun in that because I could be quite a strong character and she also turned into various other softs of characters, which was wonderful because I really got to see the extent of how far I could push myself.”
Dotchin sees her increasingly more prominent roles in Renaissance Pictures’ series as a natural progression, leading to her most important part to date, the starring role of Emilia in Jack of All Trades, and she has tremendous gratitude to the company for taking such an interest in her. “They took me from a little New Zealand show and really embraced me and looked after me,” she acknowledges. “They saw something in me and they really wanted to help me discover it myself. They gave me roles that were bigger and bigger, and let my confidence grow with them.”
Still, the offer of a leading role came as a surprise, as Dotchin explains: “I was over at the Cannes Film Festival in France, and I got a call saying, ‘Pacific Renaissance are looking for you.’” On her return to New Zealand, she learned that the producers wanted her to audition not for another guest role, as she expected, but for one of the leads in their two new Back2Back Action series, Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of All Trades.
“As you can imagine I was overwhelmed by that offer,” she admits. “I read for Cleopatra first, and then I read for Emilia. My preference was definitely Emilia because she’s much more suited to my sort of personality. It was a fantastic part! I could wear these wonderful big dramatic dresses and work with Bruce Campbell, Stuart Devenie and Stephen Papp. Cleopatra's a great show, but doing something set in the 18th Century was definitely my first choice. So it was wonderful when they chose me for that role. I was over the moon. I felt like I'd won the Lottery!”
Short-lived though the series was, Dotchin feels lucky to have been a part of Jack of All Trades. “We shot hard and fast for six months, and every day was wonderful,” she reveals. “We just had such a ridiculously fun time. I have such fond memories of my days on that show.”
The one thing she does not miss about the show, however, is the long working days. Dotchin had to get up at 4:30 every morning to be assisted into Emilia’s elaborate costume and have her hair and make-up completed in time to be ready for shooting at 7am. “The costumes were very big and authentically made, down to every stitch,” she says. “All my corsets were hand made. The entire costume from top to bottom was authentic in every way. They didn't use anything modern.”
Dotchin found that working in these heavy costumes every day was actually more like a lesson in history than a princess fantasy. “Wearing a corset takes a lot of getting used to, especially in the hot sun. It was probably a month before I could sit in a chair properly. I really feel for the women who had to wear those dresses their entire lives. I can now understand why women used to faint in a second, because you can’t breathe deeply. I had to take the dresses off for lunch because my food literally wouldn’t go down, it would just get stuck. So I had to get the crew to loosen and then tighten it back up. Plus my stomach would get bigger after lunch! And the dresses were so heavy that I got very strong and skinny from running around in them!”
Asked about her involvement in the many pranks and jokes played on the set, Dotchin explains that “Bruce is actually the biggest joker. I didn’t get that many jokes played on me, because I had so much dialogue to learn. Those lines could kill anyone, I can tell you! So I spent most of my time trying to learn the dialogue, and they would have fun around me and I’d join in every now and then.”
Despite all the studying, Dotchin did get her share of fun, however. She remembers in particular an episode in which Emilia impersonates the Daring Dragoon, and the way Campbell reacted to the role switch. “The script had Jack saying, ‘I’m not like that!’ to Emilia the whole time, but the funny thing was, in real life, Bruce was going, ‘I don’t do the Dragoon like that!’ and I’m going, ‘Yes you do, yes you do!’ We were having such a great time, because I was giving him stick both on and off screen, and he was giving me stick back! I’d be really sarcastic while I was being the Dragoon, just trying to get a rise out of him.”
Dotchin developed a very special relationship with her three co-stars on the show: Campbell, Stuart Devenie (Governor Croque, interviewed in Xena Magazine #18) and Stephen Papp (Captain Brogard). “You can imagine the four of us: we’re all over 25 but we were acting like two-year-olds for six months! When the cameras were rolling it was fine, but when the cameras were off, my goodness! The four of us were just crazy! I felt we were all born to do these roles and that we were all really well suited to the show, because we could go so over the top. There was no limit to how far out and how silly we could be.
“We had a wonderful, wonderful friendship,” she adds. “We’d go out and have dinner together because we were such good friends. And we had this wonderful atmosphere on set. You’d walk on the set at seven o’clock in the morning every day, and no matter how tired you were, it would just pick you up and you’d just be so happy to be there. I just wanted to be on set doing that job all the time.”
Despite all the fun, Dotchin still felt a deep responsibility as the lead actress in the show, in part because she had been chosen over so many actresses from both New Zealand and North America, and in part because of the much greater experience of her co-star, Bruce Campbell.
“I felt like I was an amateur all over again,” she recalls, “because I was working with an American actor who was very well known and very, very clever and confident and creative, and I really wanted to keep up with him. But he looked after me, and the more we worked together the more confidence I gained.”
Carrying off the role was a tremendous boost to Dotchin’s self esteem and professional confidence. “At the end of it, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m beginning to get this acting thing. I’ve been doing it for 10 years now and I really feel like I’ve earned my place on a set. And I feel I can do it now without the actor’s curse of “Oh, I’m not good enough.” I feel like I can really take on something big and actually handle the responsibility of it.’”
Dotchin hopes that next ‘something big’ will come from Hollywood. At the time of this interview she was preparing to go to Los Angeles for an intensive month of meetings and auditions. She has no idea what she will be auditioning for, but is very excited about the opportunity. So would she move to Los Angeles if she was offered a regular role over there?
“Absolutely!” Dotchin responds immediately. “My family travelled a lot while I was growing up, so I love to travel. I love America and I love the people there.
“So I’d move there in a heartbeat if I had the chance.”