The star of A Remarkable Place to Die reflects on her life in television.
It’s been a big year for Chelsie Preston Crayford, whose previous screen credits include Nude Tuesday, Eagle vs Shark and Underbelly: Razor. In Dark City: The Cleaner, she paced the suburban streets of Christchurch as the maniacal Melissa, a woman who quite literally busted the balls of Cohen Holloway’s Joe Middleton. Then she was off to Queenstown for four months to play Anais Mallory in murder mystery mini-series A Remarkable Place to Die, all while writing the final funding applications for her first feature film, Caterpillar.
No wonder she found herself in the middle of the woods at night somewhere in Central Otago, realising she should have done some research into how to hold a gun properly. “The problem with being a detective is you have to look really cool,” she laughs. “And I’m quite an uncoordinated person and I suddenly felt very stupid.” Maintaining Mallory’s “straight-laced” persona also posed a challenge in a helicopter scene, where Preston Crayford struggled to “look grumpy”, while also taking in these staggering views of Queenstown.
While 2024 has brought with it two giant crime-adjacent roles in Melissa and Detective Mallory, Preston Crayford admits she can’t watch anything remotely dark herself, and couldn’t handle Dark City if she hadn’t been in it. “I’m too scared. I’m such a wuss,” she says. “I do like the concept of a murder mystery, but if I have to be by myself at night time, I can’t watch anything that’s remotely scary.” Thankfully, she was brave enough to look back at her life in TV, including a shocking reality moment, seeing a sitcom legend in the flesh, and her journey to hand-acting.
My earliest television memory is… When I was maybe three or four years old, I was very obsessed with this VHS that was a first aid video of different dramatisations of emergency scenarios. I remember it so vividly. There was one with a little girl who stood too close to the heater and her nightie caught on fire. There was a guy that was in a tree and he chainsawed his leg, and a family that got lost in the woods. It was all so dramatic and I was completely obsessed with it. I remember my parents eventually confiscating the video, because I think they were like, “this is weird, you can’t watch this anymore,” and putting it on the top shelf.
The TV show that I would rush home from school to watch is… I used to watch a lot of TV after school because I was the only child of a single mum filmmaker, and I was very obsessed with TV. At one stage it must have gotten out of hand, because I remember my mum saying, “That’s it! only two hours of TV a day!” and me being like “What! that’s only Step by Step and Full House and The Simpsons AND Shortland Street!” I just remember that for a time there was this really great run after school content.
There’s another show I’ve actually referenced in my film called Average Joe Hawaii. There was a woman called Larissa, and she had to choose between 25 average Joes. I remember being sick at home one day and watching the final episode of Average Joe Hawaii. She had finally whittled it down and chosen the last guy, and they went on a tropical holiday. Then she was like, “it’s time for me to reveal the truth about something… I dated Fabio.”
The man got so angry about it that he rejected her. I just remember lying on the couch in 2003, watching this man stomp down the beach and walk out into the water. It’s just one of those things that’s lived inside me for all these years, because I was just lying on the couch watching it by myself. I remember being just flabbergasted that this was the big twist, and that he’d taken it that way. But I had no one to really share it with, and have just carried it inside me, until one day where it was like, “I am putting that in the movie.”
The TV moment that haunts me is… When I was 11, I did this TV show called William Shatner’s A Twist in the Tale. It was quite a big deal for me, but I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I got the VHS of it, and I sent it to my dad, and then when I spoke to him on the phone he was like, “it looked like you didn’t know what to do with your hands.” And I didn’t. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I watched it the other day with [my daughter] Olive because it’s on Amazon Prime now, and I was like “Wow – that girl does not know what to do with her hands.”
My earliest TV crush is… Probably Suzy Cato. But also maybe Uncle Jesse. I also had posters on the wall of Patrick Swayze.
The NZ TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… There’s so many great New Zealand ads and I feel like we just don’t make them like we used to. They used to be so elaborate. I think my favourite one is “I’m an Utter Peanut Butter Nutter.” My friend Rose Bollinger was in that – her and I both auditioned for it, and she got it.
My television guilty pleasure is… I watched Paris in Love on a long-haul flight recently, and it was one of the most haunting reality TV shows I’ve ever seen. You really think it is going to be one thing, and then you get this really wild level of insight into this very strange, sometimes very sad existence. I don’t even know if it’s a guilty pleasure. I almost feel guilty at her expense, because all the stuff that you see in it is so personal and revealing. It’s quite full on – at one point in that plane journey, I was just clutching my face and sobbing.
My favourite TV moment of all time is… I don’t want to give any spoilers, but it happens in the last season of Succession, when they’re on the plane. I think that the writing on Succession is so phenomenal and just like modern Shakespeare. Having that happen to the lead character so early on in the piece, and just knowing the rest of this series was going to be all about the fallout of that one event was so exciting. It was just such visionary writing.
My favourite TV character of all time is… Maggie in Extras. I just love that she’s such an idiot. She’s such an adorable idiot, and I think she’s such a surprising character to be his sidekick. It’s such a beautiful friendship, and she’s so soft and stupid and so ingeniously funny.
The most stylish person on television is… Fran Fine. I once watched a live taping of The Nanny. My mum [Gaylene Preston] made a film called War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, a documentary about the war stories of these seven women that had lived through World War Two, and we went to LA for a festival screening for it. So I travelled to LA with my mum and this group of women who were in their 70s and 80s, and we stayed at the New Zealand embassy. I was nine years old, and they pulled out all the stops for these women. And so we visited NASA, and did all of these crazy things, and one of them was that we got to go and watch a live taping of The Nanny. At the time it was one of my favourite shows on television, and I was obsessed with Fran Fine, because her outfits were phenomenal. It was such a thrill. That guy that plays Niles the Butler came out and did a whole lot of different accents.
My favourite character I’ve ever played is… I loved playing Melissa in Dark City: The Cleaner, because you just don’t get the opportunity to be that naughty very often. It was quite an unusual opportunity to be a ball-crushing psychopath. I get quite scared of things quite easily, so it was really liberating to be like “Oh, I’m the scary thing” – even if it was just make-believe.
The TV project I would love to be involved in is… I want to be in Fleabag. I want to play the dorky sister in Fleabag.
My most controversial TV opinion is… I don’t know if this is controversial, but I think that New Zealand reality television should be its own genre. We’re not big enough to have the level of artifice, or the leap of imagination, that a lot of those shows rely on. We don’t have the budget or the scale to get away with it, but to me that makes it so much more enjoyable. We also don’t have the culture of nastiness and drama. We’re very conflict averse as a nation, so we don’t really have the trappings to make reality TV show in the same way as America. You can see behind the curtain so much more, and I absolutely love that. People like to roll their eyes at local reality TV, but I’m here for it. I think it does something really unique.
A show that I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me I should, is… The Jinx. We had dinner at our friends house and they were talking about how amazing it was, and the first thing I asked was if it was even remotely scary, because I am such a lightweight. They said “no no no” and so we put it on when we got home, and in the first few moments there’s a floating torso, and a guy talking about having to fish it out of the water by the throat. I immediately turned it off. The world is a scary enough place, I do not need that in my imagination.
The last thing I watched on TV was… The finale of Celebrity Treasure Island. It is appointment viewing in our household. I love watching CTI because it’s very rare, as a parent, that you can watch something with your kids and all get equal amounts out of it. And that’s something quite special that show does like nothing else.
Watch Chelsie Preston Crayford in a Remarkable Place to Die Sundays 7.30pm on TVNZ1, or here on TVNZ+