Romcom returns Shore-raised actor to PumpHouse

For one of the actors preparing to perform in Tadpole Theatre’s latest heart-warming romp, Mike and Virginia, the show is proving particularly nostalgic.

Actor Jodie Rimmer says returning to rehearse at the PumpHouse Theatre in Takapuna “is like coming back home”.

The familiar face of stage and screen spent her high-school holidays on its stage, competing in North Shore Speech and Drama Society competitions, as well as appearing in North Shore Operatic productions.

This time, she is part of a top-notch cast under the inventive direction of Simon Prast, performing a fast-moving script from two of New Zealand’s busiest writers, Kathryn Burnett and Nick Ward.

Award-winning Burnett, like Rimmer, grew up on the Devonport peninsula and returns to the theatre having written Tadpole’s last sold-out PumpHouse production, 2022’s The Campervan, also directed by Prast.

The two women worked together on television series The Strip, but this is the first time Rimmer has been directed by Prast, which she says she is “buzzing” about.

Mike and Virginia tells the story of two ambitious lecturers in film studies, played by Laura Hill and Andrew Grainger. One specialises in romantic comedy and the other in monster movies, but their interaction is a romcom in itself.

Both actors have an impressive list of credits to their names. Hill was a Shortland Street regular as nurse Toni Thompson, but like Grainger has popped up in The Brokenwood Mysteries, Outrageous Fortune/Westside and a host of other television shows, and in theatre roles. Grainger was in The Campervan and recently turned out in New Zealand Opera’s The Unruly Tourists

Rimmer, who plays the part of the gossipy best friend of Hill, says all the play’s characters are a little broken by life, but the story retains a “cheering sense of humanity”.

Creative Talks

Her character is a hoot, she says, being an out-of-work actor who does shifts at a fairy shop to get by. Working as a fairy is something Rimmer has had real-life experience of, so she jokes the play is triggering for her.

The young Rimmer appeared in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Oliver Twist and The Sound of Music at the PumpHouse, before a screen career that includes being named best supporting actress in the 2003 New Zealand Film Awards for her performance in In My Father’s Den.

But it is the competitions she best remembers. “They’re great memories.”

She recalls staring out the window across the lake while at Carmel College and needing several prompts to get her head out of the clouds. Later, at Glenfield College, a drama teacher further prompted her love of make-believe. “I was always driven to the theatre,” she says.

Recently, she has been in new television show Friends Like Her and the Netflix series Sweet Tooth. An earlier claim to fame was acting alongside Hollywood star Ryan Gosling, in Young Hercules, in the late 1990s.

Rimmer grew up in Belmont, where her father, Bill Rimmer, owned the Fruitlands store for many years. Although she resides in Mt Albert these days, she regularly visits Bill, a former top football player and still a keen trumpeter, who lives at Narrow Neck.

He will be seeing the show and she hopes other people looking for a “feel good” outing will come along too.

• Mike and Virginia by Tadpole Theatre, the PumpHouse, 31 August to 10 September. Bookings at pumphouse.co.nz or ph (09) 489-8360.