Star Trek Danish Actress' Kiwi Dream Job

Her Starring Role Came With A Globetrotting Commute

- Amy Prebble

Stunning Danish actress Cecilie Stenspil couldn’t believe her luck when she landed the lead role in a TV series filmed in both Copenhagen and Queenstown.

“I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know anything about New Zealand except for The Lord of the Rings,” she says. “When I got the part, I was like, ‘Is this real? Are we actually travelling to New Zealand? And how far away is it?’”

The icing on the cake was that her partner, fellow actor Troels Lyby, was also cast in the crime caper, Straight Forward, a Kiwi-Danish co-production coming to TVNZ OnDemand.

“That was actually amazing,” says Cecilie. “We’ve both been working as actors for years and it’s very seldom that it’s possible for us to work together. The producers didn’t know that we were a couple when they hired us for the series. We were stunned that we not only got to work together, but also travel across the globe. We felt very blessed and lucky.”

Cecilie (39), who gained her acting chops in theatre before moving into TV, stars as a con woman who gets mixed up in a murderous revenge plot and flees for her life to the other side of the world. Troels (51) plays one of the baddies trying to track her down.