If you are a Lord of the Rings fan you might know him as Shagrat or Tredwill.
If you are not, you might have seen him as the mourning amputee who adopts a three-legged dog in the popular Trustpower advertisement.
Yes, it is Peter Tait - he says growing a beard ages him a decade or so and no, he is not an amputee, it is just a clever television trick that makes him look like one.
Tait is not at all perturbed that people probably do not recognise him. He is an actor for the fulfilment it brings him, not the autographs.
Back in Dunedin recently for a short stay to visit his two sisters and "recharge the home batteries", Tait recalls how he got his first taste of the stage at Kaikorai Valley High School in a rock opera written by two of his friends, John Gibson and Ian Landreth.
He has always had a talent with voices, so he ended up performing three different roles in the production.
"It got me the bug of acting. I hadn’t thought much about it before."
"I didn’t think it was possible to be an actor but I really wanted to do that."
He did not give up on his love of acting. Over the next few years he appeared in about 15 shows at the Playhouse, Globe and Allan Hall theatres.
"It was great experience. One minute you’re in a Shakespeare play, the next you’re being a heroin dealer. It’s a good training ground."
Tait credits teacher Walter Bloomfield, Mary Hopewell from Dunedin Teachers College and a German graduate from the University of Otago, Chris Balme, as helping him.
"We are all products of where we are from, but it helps to have people who believe in you enough to get there."
When he graduated, he started teaching, but admitted that it did not go well.
"One time I was doing the Maori myths with the kids, I told the story about Maui and they got really excited and we divided into three groups and one group went outside and put their desks upside down and were using them as canoes - the principal was horrified, saying ‘we don’t do that kind of thing in this school’. It was just the wrong school for me."
Instead he took a punt and auditioned for a job as a trainee actor and stage manager at Christchurch’s Court Theatre.
"It wasn’t really a career option, but it became one."
Moving north in search of work, he settled for a time in Wellington and then Auckland. It was good timing - it was the early 1980s and Greg McGee’s Foreskin’s Lament, considered a "landmark" play about rugby players, set in a changing room and at an after-match party, had hit the stage .
Tait, a keen sportsman who "did not mind being naked in a dressing room", joined the cast.
"It kind of got me going into being an actor, showed there were other roles around - not just genteel Noel-Coward-type roles, living-room dramas."
Like most young New Zealanders, Tait headed overseas, living in Australia and the United Kingdom and doing whatever he needed to do to make ends meet.
He was a performing poet for a while in London - his ability to do accents and voices came in handy but, as poet David Eggleton was in the UK at the same time doing his "mad Kiwi ranter" show, Tait had to pitch his show differently.
"So I had to be an Aussie, as I like doing voices, which was fine. Sometimes after I’d get found out as I’d talk in my normal voice and you’d get ‘you’re not a f ...... Kiwi are ya?’. Sometimes you’ve got to keep it up because people don’t like it if they find out."
It was also good to have people on your side, putting you up for roles, he said.
Ginette McDonald (of Lynn of Tawa fame) was one who liked his work. He was living in Perth when she called, asking if he wanted to come home and play a conscientious objector in television show Country GP.
"I thought it was too good to pass up. One TV thing led to another - or years of unemployment. You’d just have to keep auditioning for things and try not to lose hope."
His father always said to him he would never make a living out of acting.
"Some years I have, some years I haven’t. I have no regrets. It was what I wanted to do and when I get to do it, it’s very fulfilling.
"I couldn’t have done it staying in Dunedin."
Landscaping and odd jobs often paid the bills between jobs, and sometimes he went back to teaching.
"It’s not always easy being an actor. My partner really liked it when I was on the first Lord of the Rings as suddenly I was earning a bit of money, but it’s hard to understand when you don’t work for six months.
"You have to teach, do various odd jobs, landscape stuff to keep wolves from door."
He lived in the Far North for 15 years, where he taught at a boys’ Maori school.
"I was more nervous to do a pepeha than I was many of the productions I’ve been in - you want to get it right ’cause it’s so critical. It’s really hard. I was shaking with nerves."
While working in theatre in the 1980s, Tait slowly moved into television and films, with his first major role in New Zealand director Alison Maclean’s black and white short-film Kitchen Sink.
"I was in a couple films with her. It gave you an opportunity to be quite outside the box - strange, weird and wonderful characters."
He started to carve out a bit of a niche in short films, completing about 15 over the years.
"I seemed to be the go-to person for short films for a while; I’m a bit older now."
Some of those were his own work. He wrote, directed and produced Black River Road in 2001 and then in 2003 he wrote and acted in the short video Bogans, about some Westies who want to be in Lord of the Rings, and so go on a road trip searching for Peter Jackson.
"Then they see this guy crossing the street and they go ‘what are you looking at, hippy?’ and it’s the real Peter Jackson.
"It’s a film I just wrote and Grant [Lahood] said let’s do it - sometimes you just get a group of friends together and do things. I’ve done that a few times."
Black River Road, which was nominated for a New Zealand Film Award, was one of those. He was teaching in the Far North when he met two young local boys who he thought would look great on film, so he asked them.
"They said ‘if you write it, sir’. So I wrote this whole script based around them and I incorporated people. There was this old muso Ray Woolf and I dragged him into it and various people from around the area."
His favourite film was a short film called Singing Trophy, in which he played a hunter whose taxidermist chopped the heads off of animals and at night got them to sing.
"We filmed in this strange place in the Wairarapa, in a taxidermy museum. It was a strange experience."
In more recent times he has been involved in the Lord of the Rings films, playing Shagrat in 2003’s The Return of the King, and then in the television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, in which he played Tredwill.
The productions have been fascinating to work on, especially experiencing the make-up, wardrobe and prosthetics side of it, he said.
"When I did Return of the King, it took three and a-half to four hours to get the prosthetics on, as I was playing this big creature, but when you look at yourself you don’t see yourself .
"It was interesting when any children came to set, I’ve got this huge costume on and makeup and if they look at you terrified, you think ‘OK, I must look OK then’."
Tait enjoys working in the film industry and the people he meets.
"I love the challenge of it and you meet some great people, you might just have a s..... wee role, but you meet some neat people.
"The best person I met was Bill Nighy, the English actor. He’s such a funny lovely guy. To be in a trailer listening to him talk, he was really funny and had all these interesting tales.
"I like seeing him on screen sometimes. He’s a bit twitchy, different."
The Lord of the Rings productions were eye-openers, as there could be 100 people on set, yet when the call went out for quiet, it just went quiet, he said.
They were also happy to ask the actors for their feedback and suggestions.
"I was expecting them to want us to stick to their lines but no, they were like ‘if we are going to spend 100 grand on this shot we want the actors to be happy’."
A bonus in Rings of Power was being asked if he wanted to do his own stunts, an opportunity Tait grabbed.
"I loved stunt training. It was great. You got to learn all these moves. Then I had this great battle scene which we filmed over quite a few nights."
Other productions he has been in include 2009’s Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and the television series The Brokenwood Mysteries, in which he has had a reoccurring role as Doug Randall.
"I play a grumpy father. It’s been really enjoyable to have a reoccurring role. I’ve met a lot of people in the Far North like him. I enjoyed playing the character, I felt he was real, cantankerous and certainly wouldn’t like the Labour government."
He also appeared in television’s Westside in 2018.
These days he continues to audition, looking for his next role. The pandemic means that a lot of auditions are now done through "self tapes" where the actor films himself.
Tait also does a lot of voice work for documentaries; again, his ability to put on different voices comes in handy for that work.
But his biggest role yet is about to happen - Grandad.
