Jemaine Clement: Australians have a great attitude to being made fun of

Dressed in a smart black coat, Jemaine Clement arrives at our Wellington interview by bike. He’s an unswerving non-driver: “When I was growing up in the Wairarapa we couldn’t afford a car and then I got to Wellington and didn’t need a car.”

We are talking at Deluxe, the boho cafe where his fellow Conchord Bret McKenzie used to work – between the dilapidated artists’ joint the duo once shared and the “flasher” home where Clement now lives with his wife, Miranda, and son, Sophocles Iraia.

New Zealand television producers refused to fund Flight of the Conchords before it became a sublime smash hit on HBO. “They’d say, ‘Middle New Zealand won’t get it.’ Idiots! I’d go, ‘What are you talking about? I’m from middle New Zealand, and you’re not.’ I always have a working-class chip on my shoulder about those people.”

The mild-mannered Clement still agrees with his past critique. “Not being too clever is a concern in New Zealand TV. It does really annoy me.”

His very funny vampire comedy, What We Do in the Shadows, arrives in Australia having already topped the New Zealand box office. Clement and sometime Conchords director Taika Waititi not only produced and directed the film, but wrote and starred in it too.

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It begins with vampires Viago (Waititi) and Vladislav (Clement) upbraiding their flatmate Deacon (Jonny Brugh) for slovenliness around their shared home. Memories of the Conchords’ nearby flat at 41 Hawker Street provided the inspiration. “There was a period there where I was the tidiest person and, if you knew me, that would really speak to you of the level of how bad it was,” Clement says.

It was McKenzie who wanted to move there – he’d scoped out the front yard as a performance space for a new play. “It was famous for being a big party house for local punks,” Clement says. “There were just bottles and pills strewn all over the floor.

“Bret wanted to dig this grave because this play was called Dirt, about a guy who ran a funeral home from his own house. We tried to dig a grave and it just had all this rubbish – the landlord hadn’t got rid of it; he’d just covered it up.”

Living standards in Wellington are still pretty bad, says Clement, discreetly eating a pumpkin and feta sandwich and drinking a berry smoothie. “I came into this cafe when I first arrived from Masterton. And they had cake, and it was like $3.” He pauses. “I thought that meant the whole cake,” he says with a suddenly loud laugh.

Raised modestly by his Māori mother and grandmother, Clement is a direct descendant of the Wairarapa chief Iraia Te Whaiti, who started his own printing press and school when “there were restrictions on Māori people being businesspeople at all”. Following whānau tradition, Clement named his son after him. “Everyone in my family for generations has had at least one Māori name; can’t break it now,” says the actor, whose own middle names Atea and Mahana mean universe and heat.

There was only one mention of his heritage in Conchords, an episode in which New Zealand’s incompetent prime minister came to New York. “I do love talking about race [now] I have a son. As a pale-skinned Māori person, I felt like a spy as a kid.”

Later, Clement dropped out of Victoria University (“over-analysis in some things; not in their own life or their own culture”) and got work on a TV sketch show called Skitz. “I was only 21 when they started it and remember, because I was part-Māori, having to play things like the street kids and glue sniffers. And going, that’s not my experience at all. I’ve never sniffed glue. I find the whole idea of drugs horrible. I would always insist on having a hood because I was so ashamed to be taking down my race like that.”

Cliff Curtis, New Zealand’s other leading Māori actor in Hollywood, says 40-year-old Clement is a genius: “Jemaine’s hilarious, the king of the understated. He just look sideways and for some reason it’s funny.” But Clement himself names Rhys Darby, aka the Conchords’ manager, Murray, who plays a werewolf in Shadows, as the funniest man he has ever worked with – even if he does appear in “too many ads”.

Another inspiration is the Melbourne-based Kiwi satirist John Clarke, who hasn’t flown out of Australia since the 1970s. “John Clarke, like with Woody Allen, I find quite inspiring, because they’ve been doing it so long and they keep coming up with new good stuff.”

Like Clarke, Clement appreciates the Australian sense of humour, recalling the good-natured responses to jibes in the Flight of the Conchords episodes, Drive By and Unnatural Love. “They have such a great attitude to being made fun of.”

Are the Conchords, dormant at the moment, waiting to erupt again? “We talk about a movie every so often,” says Clement. “Sometimes it feels like we lost a lot of impetus over the last couple of years. But Bret, James [Bobin, lead director] and me, we all want to do a musical. It would be good to do something all together … I miss playing Flight of the Conchords gigs.”

HBO have commissioned a new, four-episode comedy show from Clement and Waititi, he reveals. “It was supposed to be this year but then we decided to put What We Do in the Shadows out ourselves.” He is also quietly excited to announce he is playing the lead in People, Places and Things, James Strouse’s new film about a graphic novelist.

He shows me drawings of the character he is sketching daily. “The first time I’ve played a nice guy,” he says, smiling. But Jemaine was awesome, I insist. “He’s OK,” says his alter ego. “A bit socially unaware. Sensitive for sure.”