After the Party will premiere on TVNZ 1 and TVNZ+ on 29 October at 8.30pm. Photo: Mark Rogers
Frustrated by the lack of decent roles for middle-aged women, actor Robyn Malcolm and screenwriter Dianne Taylor decided to do something about it.
The pair put their heads together to create After the Party, a six-part drama series set in Wellington which premieres on TVNZ at the end of the month.
Its main character, played by Malcolm, is a woman in her 50s whose world implodes when she accuses her ex-husband of a sex crime and nobody believes her.
Malcolm said she had been through a few auditions and been passed over by directors who chose younger actresses.
"It got to the point where we thought 'let's just make something'."
Taylor said they started with the idea of writing something about "angry middle-aged women".
They mined their own lives for the raw material for the show - "and some of it was pretty raw."
"We shared stuff... and in some ways it what like... therapy." Taylor said.
Malcolm said they had many discussions about what was acceptable for middle-aged women appearing in films and television.
They noticed plenty of great, older female actors in rom-coms "wearing white and laughing a lot to make themselves acceptable on screen."
They also found "lots of kitchen porn - who knows a middle-aged woman like that? I don't," Malcolm said.
"We had a lot of conversations about the stuff that seems unacceptable on screen as far as women of our age and so we started flirting with all of that.."
Taylor said she was determined to write something a younger woman could not not be cast in.
They decided the central character would have her middle-aged female body "front and centre."
Having worked as a nude life drawing model, Malcolm has learned to be comfortable in her own skin.
New Zealand actor Robyn Malcolm said she helped create a new TV series partly because she was sick of being passed over for younger actors. Photo: Jae Frew
Scottish actor Peter Mullan came to New Zealand to play the ex-husband, who may or not be a pedophile.
Malcolm said they wanted the audience to engage in a "psychological dance" between the woman and the man she accuses of a sex crime.
"Either... her accusation is wrong and she's absolutely destroyed a man's life, or she's right and she's been gas-lit her whole life."
Although the series focusses on human drama, it also touches on environmental issues.
"In the middle of all this personal, emotional chaos of these human beings, there's a world that's going on around them, the natural world that keeps coming in and out of their world... we're all part of the same thing," Malcolm said.
