The musician, actor and star of upcoming documentary Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds takes us through his life in television.
Musician Marlon Williams has been on our My Life in TV wish list ever since he revealed during his My Boy tour that he wrote ‘Thinking of Nina’ about a character from spy drama The Americans. “The plight of Nina had a really big effect on me during the pandemic,” he tells The Spinoff over Zoom. “I really love that show – most of my favourite TV shows are all about marriage or about normal relationships against the backdrop of insane drama.”
He soon rattles off his other favourite TV shows of all time: The Wire, Borgen and The Leftovers. “It’s just quite delicious to watch something that is so ambitious in scope,” he says. “I love that kind of television, where someone is willing to try and pull something off.” Along with prestige TV, Williams has also long been a fan of music documentaries like Don’t Look Back and The Beatles Anthology, which he says “formed a lot of the backbone of my musical upbringing.”
Now Williams joins the genre himself in Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds. Director Ursula Grace Williams (Zealandia, STILL HERE) followed him around for four years as he toured and wrote Te Whare Tīwekaweka, his first album entirely in te reo Māori. “It certainly was not part of my game plan for making the record,” Williams laughs. “But I was impressed by her work and just said ‘OK, if you really want to follow me around, let’s make something.’”
Even as someone who has appeared in front of the camera before in series like Sweet Tooth and films like A Star is Born, Williams says he wasn’t as prepared for the documentary lens. “I kept remembering that it’s me they’re following and not a character, which took a while to get used to,” he says. “And then once I got used to it, I got terrified of the fact that I was used to it – what does that say about me, that I’m used to having a camera following me everywhere I go?”
What helped was relinquishing control: “if you’re gonna entrust someone to do this, then it’s their project, and it’s their eye on you.” The result is an extremely candid exploration of Williams “trying to find home” in te ao Māori as an artist and a person. “I think if you can be vulnerable and transparent in such a public way, then hopefully it will give other people the courage too,” he says. “This guy’s just absolutely stumbling his way through, so maybe I can stumble too.”
Ahead of the release of Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds, he took us through his own life in TV, including his favourite chafing ad and the patriotism of Neighbours at War.
My earliest TV memory is… I’m thinking it’s You and Me with Suzy Cato. All that children’s television from the mid-90s lives in a very sacred temple in my head. I follow a million different accounts on Instagram that are all retro nostalgia 90s shit, because they all remind me of those precious few moments on the couch before you have to go to school. All those bright 90s colours that Suzy in particular was a massive proponent of. It all lives rent-free in my head.
The show I used to rush home from school to watch… I used to love those weird shows like Courage the Cowardly Dog, when Nickelodeon was in this post-Ren & Stimpy world where everything was kind of fucked up. I’ve gone back and watched a lot of them recently, and they were still just as scary as they were then. I was also a Dragon Ball Z diehard, a Pokemon diehard, a Digimon diehard. I rode every wave that someone of my vintage could ride.
My earliest TV crush was… Melissa Joan Hart from Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Loved Sabrina and Salem. She just lived in that sort of classic cookie cutter American world that was so sort of weirdly appealing to kids. I remember having early stirrings and being like, “oh, I’d like that girl to be my friend”.
The NZ TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… It’s for a 3B product for anti-chafing – [breaks out into crooner voice] “do we have to suffer and cryyyy the whole day throouuugh?” I just thought that was so funny. The song was sick and that animation style is so painfully nostalgic. Sometimes I’ll just go onto Freeview just to watch the ads to see if I can get that hit again, but I seldom do.
My first time on television was… I was 15 with my friend Ben Woolley, who still plays with me in my band. We were on CTV performing Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’. I’ve still got the DVD, and it’s pretty harrowing viewing, but that was my very first time working the camera angles.
My TV guilty pleasure is…. I’ve been recently getting into re-watching old episodes of Neighbours at War. It’s pretty amazing. I’ve been really enjoying getting such a good glimpse at middle New Zealand of that era. Some of it’s pretty problematic through a modern lens, but it’s pretty compelling viewing. I’m really in love with the parochial complaints of white picket fence New Zealand, like the hippies in Tākaka dumping rubbish over the fence of their conservative neighbours.
The TV moment that haunts me is… A couple of years ago, we were playing at Rhythm and Alps festival down in Wānaka. New Year’s Eve was also my birthday, so we always have a big crazy time on New Year’s Eve. Fast forward to the first of January and us sitting around in the void of a hotel restaurant, waiting for our fish and chips or whatever. We’re just all sitting around in silence, sort of contemplating the night’s events, and then Ben Woolley was like “don’t look behind you”. I turned around, and I’m on the telly from the night before, just absolutely sending it on the news. The TV was on silent so all I could see was me with this reporter. It’s not something that anyone should have to see the day after New Year’s in a hotel restaurant.
The funniest TV show of all time is… I’m a Peep Show fiend. The lineage of English comedy is so strong that you could pick any moment in the chain from the Monty Pythons all the way through to Alan Partridge, and then The Office. I still think that The Office was such a game changer in terms of what we’re laughing at, and it definitely walked so Peep Show could run. Still, Peep Show is the show I will always go back to. I can probably, line for line, quote all of Peep Show back. Whenever Mark Corrigan has a mental breakdown is a great moment.
My favourite TV project I’ve ever been involved in is… I loved doing Sweet Tooth. It was right in the heart of Covid and it was just such a magical world to go into. While everyone was stuck inside, I got to be in a zoo film set with all these animatronic children running around. It was such a surreal experience that I was able to do that during COVID times. I don’t think anything will ever quite touch this surreality and bizarreness of doing that.
My controversial TV opinion is… I’m not a fan of the American Office at all. I find almost any TV show being remade and recontextualised like that a weird thing to do when there are so many great writers wanting to make incredible original work.
A show I will never watch, no matter how many people say I should is… Better Call Saul is one that I still haven’t gotten into, and I think it’s now that point where I probably won’t. I feel like I’m on the wrong side of it or something. But then I was like that with Succession and I finally watched it, and I loved it.
The last thing I watched on television was… Naked Attraction. It was really interesting. It’s changed a bit since I last saw it, but it also hasn’t really changed at all.
Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds is in cinemas May 1
