Wearing dark double denim and a white T-shirt, with thick black Hockney-esque glasses balanced on his nose, Jemaine Clement walks into the lounge of a smart London hotel and immediately points to the medley of ornamental headwear hanging behind me. “You should put that on,” he remarks, gesturing towards a gentleman’s top hat. “It’ll really suit you.”
A friend, his fellow New Zealander Cliff Curtis, one of Hollywood’s leading Māori actors, once said of Clement that he just looks sideways and for some reason, it’s hilarious. Watching him adapt to these plush surroundings – a giant chandelier, striped marble, towering delphiniums – I think Curtis was exactly right. “Sometimes it just feels funny to do a little expression,” Clement says, with a little expression. “Maybe I rely on them too much.”
The 52-year-old is laconic and softly spoken; his laugh reduces his eyes to narrow lines. There is something about his mouth – the way his lips occasionally purse – that feels both conspiratorial and mischievous. That face, over the past three decades, has become synonymous with a very particular brand of deadpan comedy. There was Flight of the Conchords, the show featuring the folk-parody duo Clement established with Bret McKenzie, which became an HBO phenomenon. Then there was What We Do in the Shadows, the glorious vampire flatshare mockumentary turned franchise.
He has also been a marine biologist in the last two Avatar films, and was a scene-stealing auctioneer in last year’s A Minecraft Movie. Now there is Alice and Steve, Disney’s sharp new six-part comedy-drama, in which he plays a recently divorced celebrity hairstylist who begins sleeping with his best friend’s 26-year-old daughter.
On the page, the character seems very much a “villain”, says Clement. But look beyond the age gap and there is tenderness, too. As Steve, Clement is a study in nuance, hitting a sweet spot of ambiguity. He’s a man for whom you are never quite sure whether to root. Played without a hint of sleaze, this is a guy chasing love and happiness – but down the most ruinous of avenues.
Made by the producers of Baby Reindeer and garlanded with three awards at the Canneseries festival, Alice and Steve is wrong-footing and rigorously unsentimental. With echoes of the first series of hit Netflix show Beef, which Clement loves, it’s also an arms race of petty revenge, the former friends laying waste to each other’s lives. Opposite Clement, Nicola Walker, that doyenne of the British detective drama, is spirited and vituperative as Alice, reeling off voice notes that brand Steve “a piggy-eyed, big-nosed, ugly f***ing paedo loser”.
As a pale-skinned Māori person, I felt like a spy as a kid
Given Clement is twice the age of Yali Topol Margalith, the actor who plays Alice’s daughter Izzy, the presence of an intimacy coordinator was a relief. While the sex scenes take place off screen, the kissing does not, and Clement is grateful that someone was there to choreograph it. “In the pre-Weinstein era, we were expected to improvise those things,” he says. “Usually the director’s been yelling at me, ‘No, go for it!’” Far from “ruining the spontaneity”, the planning put him at ease. “I was more relaxed knowing what we were going to do, rather than having to make it up.” Being the elder of the two, he had assumed that he would be the one doing the reassuring. Margalith had other ideas. “She made it very easy for me.”
In one of the series’ best scenes, Alice – having exhausted most other modes of sabotage – tries to expose Steve in front of her daughter and her friends by steering the conversation towards Woody Allen. She knows Steve adores his films, despite the actor-auteur’s reputation having taken a dive – particularly among younger generations – because of child abuse allegations he has always denied. Plus there’s the fact that he began a relationship with his then partner Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, when he was 56 and she was 21. Alice’s little trap is perfectly vicious.
While Steve has no trouble separating the art from the artist, Clement sees the funny side of Allen apologists. “People say it’s his daughter!” he says, adopting a tone of mock incredulity. “It’s not his daughter!” He returns to relative sincerity. “Even since we filmed it, Allen’s been revealed to have been friends with Jeffrey Epstein. That’s another layer that wasn’t there a year ago.”
What about Michael Jackson? Despite the sexual abuse allegations levelled against the man branded the King of Pop, Jackson’s popularity proved impregnable; the recent film Michael – criticised for skating over those very accusations – is on track to become the highest-grossing music biopic ever made. Clement hasn’t listened to Jackson since watching the Channel 4 documentary Leaving Neverland, which laid out the allegations in harrowing detail. Or rather, he listens, but only to the part of Jackson’s catalogue that is left untarnished. “When he’s a kid,” he explains. “But otherwise I’ve deliberately not put him on.”
For Clement, Steve is the latest in a run of louche, morally compromised characters. He played a professor who seduces his student in the 2020 comedy I Used to Go Here, and a hippy sex guru in 2022’s Nude Tuesday. Does he seek these parts out? Not consciously, he says. If anything, he sees a different pattern entirely. “One year I was in six things, and they were all doctors and professors. In Avatar, I’m a biologist. I’d just done Legion, where I was a scientist of some unnamed science. Everything for a while was professors.” Maybe it’s the way he looks. “I’ve had people on the street say, ‘You just look like a writer.’ Usually when I’m wearing a cardigan.”
Not that he objects to the typecasting, given that 80 per cent of his job, he reckons, is him wrestling with scripts. “People know me as an actor, but I spend much more time writing.” That this trend has emerged, he adds, is down to a “lack of imagination”. “It’s like, ‘Who could play this doddery old man? Oh, the guy who played the doddery old man before.’” At least Steve marked a sort of departure. “I’d never played a hairstylist.”
Clement was born in Masterton, a provincial town 60 miles north of Wellington, the eldest of three brothers raised by his Māori mother and grandmother in what he calls an arty, working-class family. He was between two worlds, at home in neither. “As a pale-skinned Māori person, I felt like a spy as a kid,” he reflects. That duality has trailed him into the work.
He has turned down Māori roles, he explains, on the grounds that he doesn’t look Māori enough. One was the beloved New Zealand comedian Billy T James, visibly Māori in a way Clement is not. Reading the script, he learnt that James, as a boy, had been made to sit apart from the white patrons in the cinema – an experience Clement would have been spared. “If I went by myself, I’d be allowed with the white people,” he says. “If I went with my grandma, I’d be in the Māori section.” Be that as it may, he believes his comedy is an extension of his heritage. “Storytelling was a big part of the culture.”
His career started almost by accident. Flight of the Conchords – formed when he and McKenzie were at university – were conceived chiefly as a way to learn the guitar. Both men dropped out around the same time; left to their own devices in a flat shared with eight studying housemates, they wrote songs instead. And what songs: fourth-wall-breaking pastiche delivered with a po-faced earnestness, among them the seduction anthem “Business Time” and the brilliantly daft “Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenoceros”. Their first gig, played to a near-empty Wellington bar, brought what little house there was down. Nearly 30 years on, the Conchords have sold out arenas, including multiple nights at London’s O2.
Threaded throughout his career is Taika Waititi, the Oscar-winning director of Jojo Rabbit whom he befriended as a student (and worked with most notably on What We Do in the Shadows). Once, Clement hired him; now, more often than not, it’s the other way round. “He’s the elder brother who tells me what to do,” he says. “He suffers no fools – even though he is one, in a different way.”
McKenzie, by contrast, gravitated towards music. As well as releasing two solo albums, he wrote songs for The Simpsons and for 2011’s The Muppets, the latter earning him an Academy award for the power ballad “Man or Muppet”. There was a time, Clement admits, when he felt left out, but the envy has since mellowed into something mutual. “I wish I could do music more,” he says. “And he wishes he was making TV.”
For all that, Wellington, still his base, is where he would rather be. He spent four months in Notting Hill making Alice and Steve, and arrived determined to throw himself at London, to see shows and hear bands. It lasted about two weeks. “Then I was back to staying home alone,” he says, happily.
The one excursion that stuck was ABBA Voyage, the holographic concert in east London, which he saw with the actor Matt Berry. Twice. Berry, a friend and fellow ABBA obsessive, had proposed they take the seated section rather than the dancefloor near the stage. But as soon as they sat down, Berry knew it was a mistake. “He insisted, ‘We’ve got to stand up there.’” So they booked more tickets and went to see it again.
Soon he’ll fly home, where a new science-fiction pilot awaits. What is it about? He can’t tell me. The lips purse, and he looks sideways. For some reason, it’s hilarious.
‘Alice and Steve’ is on Disney+ now
