Oh Baby! Laurel's Life Imitates Art

It's Positive News on and Off the Screen.

- Amy Prebble

When actresses Laurel Devenie and Sally Martin were filming an episode for the 2019 return of Shortland Street, both their characters were pregnant, but there was one key difference.

“We were standing next to each to other with one false belly and one real one!” says Laurel, who is over the moon about the impending arrival of her and partner Matt Keene’s baby daughter in May. Kate – Laurel’s Shorty character – lost her partner Mo in last year’s gory cliffhanger before finding out she was going to have a baby.

“The crazy thing is, when I found out I was pregnant, they had already written Kate’s pregnancy in,” says Laurel (35). “The producer was away for a couple of weeks. I was about to go down and tell the production team my news, but then I got the script that says Kate throws away the Pill. I was like, ‘Okay, that works really well!’”

The actress admits that four and a half years ago, she had pretty much given up on finding love and starting a family. “I was single and very aware of it. In New Zealand, there’s this point when it’s just a bit harder to be single. I got an opportunity to do the Edinburgh Festival with a solo show and I thought, ‘I’ll just go to London and meet the man of my dreams.’” Instead, she found London grey and miserable, and eventually decided – while attending a close friend’s funeral in the Netherlands – that the UK wasn’t the place for her.