For Jemaine Clement, Acting Is Easier Than Writing

Jemaine Clement is once again preparing to embrace what he calls his dreaded “writer’s body.”

After a self-imposed writing hiatus, the New Zealand multihyphenate — arguably still best known with Bret McKenzie as one half of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords — is ready to return to the shadows of the dark office and the fears of the blank page. He has a TV project set up — a comedy sci-fi series, “which I’m not allowed to say anything about,” that he’ll begin writing “as soon as the deal gets done.”

But before he puts pen to paper, Clement is bracing for the side effects. Writing, he admits, does a number on him. “For writer-performers, there’s your acting body, and there’s your writing body,” he explains. “When I’m writing, my skin’s like gray, I put on weight. It’s totally different. With acting, only the first day is stressful. Writing is stressful all the time. I love it. But my writing body is a mess.”

Clement stepped away from writing after an intense, back-to-back stretch of TV projects, including Wellington Paranormal, What We Do in the Shadows (the small-screen spin on his 2014 vampire mockumentary with Taika Waititi), and Apple TV’s Time Bandits. “It was too much,” he admits. “I only wrote the first two seasons of What We Do in the Shadows, but I was doing Wellington Paranormal at the same time. I’d have 10 episodes of one to rewrite or review, and six of the other. And neither producer cared that I was already running another show.”

After wrapping Time Bandits, Clement pivoted to the “much less stressful” work of acting. Recently, he’s played marine biologist Dr. Garvin in James Cameron’s Avatar 2 and 3, taken on the role of tech billionaire Alton Appleton in M3GAN 2.0 (“I often get typecast as the professor or the scientist, the guy who does the exposition,” he jokes), and flexed his dramatic chops in the upcoming Disney+ “wrongcom” Alice and Steve, starring as a fifty-something man who falls into a relationship with his best friend’s far-younger daughter.

He’s also racked up a slate of high-profile voice roles: reprising Tamatoa for Disney’s live-action Moana, playing Owl Rex in Travis Knight’s stop-motion epic Wildwood, and returning as the purple prehistoric elephant Lou in Kiri and Lou Go Raaa!, the feature adaptation of New Zealand’s beloved preschool series. Clement is at this year’s Annecy Animation Festival for the premiere of Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! and for Knight’s extended sneak peek of Wildwood.

“One thing I do prefer, acting in animation as opposed to live-action, is that in live-action I often imagine the character looking different, then when I watch it, it’s like ‘oh, it’s just me’,” he says. “But with animation, you look like you imagine. I’m the purple elephant!”

Clement’s affection for children’s animation extends beyond his own projects, and he’s quick to lay claim to one of the genre’s biggest contemporary hits for his fellow Kiwis. “Well, Bluey is made in Australia,” he notes, “but the creators are also New Zealanders,” pointing to series director Rich Jeffery and animator Mark Paterson. “We’ve done festivals together [with Kiri and Lou and Bluey] and it was a shock to me that they were from New Zealand. That’ll be a real scandal in Australia. It’s their biggest industry!”

Flight of the Conchords fans will also be happy to know that Clement’s recent reunion with McKenzie —the duo did a short run of concerts in the U.S. and New Zealand earlier this year, their first performances in nearly a decade — was not a one-off. “We’ve started new songs,” Clement confirms, “and we are talking about touring again for the first time in eight years. We didn’t have time to finish the new songs for our last show because we had to relearn the old ones.”

And those rumors of a Flight of the Conchords film? “I can’t promise anything, but the idea is not completely dead,” he says. “We talk about that every so often, but mostly we’re really a live act. We did the TV show, which of course was the biggest thing we’ve ever done, but we started off playing bars, and that feels like what [Flight of the Conchords] was designed to do.”