Brokenwood's Fern ‘I'VE FALLEN IN LOVE ALL OVER AGAIN!'

Her heartbreaking return to Aotearoa has had a happy ending

- Sebastian van der Zwan

After three years crisscrossing the globe, returning regularly to New Zealand to shoot her lead role in The Brokenwood Mysteries, actress Fern Sutherland thought she had finally found a place to call home as she and her partner Jarrod Kilner started putting down roots in Toronto.

“It’s such a vibrant, multicultural city, so close to New York, and we had a great apartment in Little Italy,” the Taranaki-born star tells Woman’s Day wistfully. “The temperatures get down to -30 degrees, so you’re constantly at war with the elements, but I love winter and really like the man-versus-wild aspect. We were finally starting to feel settled and the plan was to get permanent residency…”

Then along came 2020. That February, as borders began to close, panicked Brokenwood producers called Fern, 33, telling her to hightail it back to Aotearoa so she wouldn’t miss filming the internationally popular murder-mystery series that June.

“It seemed crazy, but there was so much uncertainty,” she recalls. “We knew New Zealand would be the best place to weather the storm, but giving up on this life that we’d put so much energy into setting up was really sad.”

After a tearful debate about what to do, Fern and landscape designer Jarrod, 38, had 48 hours to “pack up our house, clean the apartment, negotiate with our landlord, cancel our bank account and utilities, and give away everything we couldn’t fit in our bags”, before getting on a flight to Auckland via Vancouver.