Pushing the boat out

The true story of meth smugglers being caught out by folk in a small Northland town comes to television

- RUSSELL BROWN

In recent years, Temuera Morrison has spent a lot of his time on screen playing an alien bounty hunter or hanging out with superheroes. In Far North, he's just an everyman, the still point at the centre of a mad story that actually happened right here on Planet Earth.

"It was beautiful to act without a helmet on my head," he says. "That can get a bit tedious."

Morrison, best known to the wider world as Star Wars' Boba Fett, comes out from under the helmet to play "Ed", opposite Robyn Malcolm as "Heather" - the first time they've acted together since they were both on Shortland Street in 1994. Their parts are based on the real-life Northland couple who found themselves caught up in a comically bungled plot to land half a tonne of Chinese methamphetamine on the beach at Ahipara in 2016.

Far North had its birth when writer-director David White knocked on the couple's door to ask if he could tell their story. He drove to Ahipara to find them, he says, after reading a news report about the bust and thinking, "I don't truly believe that all the facts are being told here.

"I met 'Ed' and spent two hours talking to him about it and I thought there is so much to the story that is not in the public eye yet and it's so fantastical on so many levels everything from the size of the drug bust to how they weren't particularly good at it. I just knew there was something in it. I basically offered to buy their life rights on the spot."

The thing about Far North is that as "based on" stories go, it's remarkably close to the truth. White wasn't able to meet the Tongan conspirators ("the lawyers either wouldn't allow me to go talk to them in prison, or they didn't want to be spoken to"), but he had 2000 pages of court records to work with - and, in places, just paste into his script.