Less Drama, More Honesty

What’s next for actress Amanda Billing? As she ponders new directions, she reflects on her grief on leaving Shortland Street, the ups and downs of an unconventional life and the power of being a great teacher.

- Judy Bailey

I wish I could look out into the world and find a place that I fit.” Amanda Billing pauses wistfully for a moment and then smiles her beautiful broad smile and says, “I think it probably exists and I’m in it!”

These thoughts are, as she would say, “classic Amanda Billing”. She is one of our most successful actors. A teacher and former star of the long-running TV soap, Shortland Street, she has also held lead roles in heavyweight theatrical productions like Lysistrata and Macbeth.

She finds herself now at a crossroads, in between gigs. “I feel like I’m at a place I’ve been before. What happens next? It’s forcing me to be more creative and think what I really want to do in a deep way.”

We meet in her tiny central city apartment which happily overlooks an equally tiny but beautiful, leafy park. It feels like an oasis from the bustle outside. It’s a steamy Auckland day and she’s sporting one of her own clothing designs… a tank with the words “Force

Majeure” emblazoned on the front. It is, she tells me, one of her dad’s favourite sayings, perhaps because, in so many ways, it sums up his courageous, independent, freethinking daughter. She is, as one of the dictionary definitions of force majeure goes, a person of irresistible compulsion and superior strength. Her T-shirts, all bearing sharp slogans with multiple meanings, have become sought-after items. New Zealand’s newest acting sensation, Thomasin McKenzie, rocked one on the red carpet at the Sundance Festival for the premiere of the movie