ACTOR Gavin Rutherford is a “chunky fellow” who looks uncannily like Oscar winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman (Truman Capote).
“People also say I look like Peter Helliar from Rove,” laughs Rutherford, who toyed with the idea of sending a letter to the show saying Helliar looks uncannily like a Wellington actor called Gavin Rutherford.
The 37 year old’s talents are more on a par with Hoffman’s than Helliar’s. He seems to nail every theatre role he plays.
In 2008, Rutherford was nominated in the Best Actor/ Outstanding Performance category at the Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards for his compelling performance as a man named Beane who falls in love with an imaginary woman in Love Song; he nabbed a Chappy for Best Supporting Actor in Uncle Vanya, and won Most Outstanding Performer at the 2007 Wellington Fringe Awards for his role in Hotel.
The awards haven’t necessarily led to more work, but he thinks they have helped him get fit.
After playing Bob McLean in Where Are You My Only One, he was offered a free membership to a local hot yoga gym, which he thanks in his latest biography for Circa’s new show Dead Man’s Cell Phone.
“I have lost a bit of weight,” he says. “I am a chunky enough fellow and still eat burgers.”
While the minority (men) in the class stretch and hold poses in the heated room without tops on, Rutherford favours modesty.
“I’m not going to put my gut out there too much, so I wear a shirt.”
In Dead Man’s Cell Phone Rutherford plays Dwight, the brother of a dead man. The play features a woman sitting in a café (Mel Dodge) who answers the incessant ringing cell phone belonging to the man who has died, which is sitting on the table next to her.
In doing so she enters the lives of his friends, mistress, and Rutherford’s family.
The play explores how dead people can live on in technology, their voice message on their cell phone or a Facebook page that stays live and continues to be added to by loved ones left behind.
“Like the girl found in Wellington harbour,” says Rutherford. “People were putting messages on her Facebook account [afterwards].”
He says the play also asks “Are you aware of the messages once you are dead”?
The play has a surrealist aspect, evident in another of writer Sarah Ruhl’s plays The Clean House, which saw her win the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn Award. In 2005, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2006 received the MacArthur Fellowship (“genius grant”).
Could these accolades have a flow-on effect for Rutherford at the next Chapman Tripp awards?
Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Circa Theatre, April 10 – May 8, (Tues – Wed: 6.30pm; Thu – Sat: 8pm; Sun: 4pm).