Rhys Darby – From the Army to Flight of the Conchords
“It was a long march for Rhys Darby to go from the New Zealand army to starring in Flight Of The Conchords, writes Richard Fitzpatrick” in an article in The Irish Examiner.
After finishing high school in Auckland in the early 1990s, the comedian and actor joined the army to achieve what he calls his goal of “world domination”
“I needed to rise up through the ranks and become commander. I started as a cadet in the regular force cadet school. They trained me there. I graduated and became a radio operator. I was in the Royal New Zealand Signal Corps for three years,” he said. Then I got a girlfriend. It was all over then. You go away for two weeks on these military exercises. I said, ‘I’m not doing this army crap anymore.”
After the turn of the millennium, Darby moved to the UK and drifted into a career in show business “working the comedy scene with his gift for mime, physical comedy and sound effects.”
“It was his role towards the end of the Noughties in Flight of the Conchords — the HBO hit comedy series — that propelled him into stardom,” writes Fitzpatrick.
“Darby played the band’s gormless, deeply uncool manager, Murray Hewitt.”
“Everybody sees a part of them in this person — a person who doesn’t have much direction in life. Doesn’t really know where he’s going,” said Darby.
“Everyone goes into a job or a career when they leave school — even like I did with the army — with no real idea where it’s heading and you kind of hope for the best. You ‘fake it until you make it’. That’s what Murray represents. He’s the loser in all of us, but he becomes a winner — because he manages the Conchords!”
“Darby is currently touring his comedy show, Mystic Time Bird,” which is described as “an offbeat set-up, with a spice of philosophical depth added in.”
“The baseline of it is my mother passing away two years ago and how that affected me,” said Darby. “I missed her and I wanted to find out what was going to happen to me now that I don’t have a mum. So I looked into mysticism and taking the advice of a shaman.”
“In your previous lives, he said ‘You were birds’. I thought it was crazy but then as I left I thought about it; I started dreaming about birds. I realised maybe I was a bird in my previous life because it made sense”.
“This became the idea for the show. It’s full of crazy impressions of pre-historic birds but also there’s a bit of where do we go in our lives and how do we feel when our loved ones pass and how do we get through it.”
Article Source: Irish Examiner, Richard Fitzpatrick, October 17, 2018
Image Source: Wikipedia
