Niwa Whatuira is the ex-con son of a drag queen in the new TV series The Boy, The Queen and Everything In Between, set on Auckland’s infamous Karangahape Rd. Joanna Wane asks what a straight
guy like him is doing in a show like this.

If Niwa Whatuira is ever up for a change of career, he’d make a great drag queen. A strapping lad with chiselled cheekbones and a five o’clock shadow, the Auckland actor is an amateur rock rapper and has spent a lot of his time lately hanging out with the queens on K’ Rd.

“Chuck me in heels and I’d be massive!” he says, with a laugh. “But I went to acting school, so my comfort zone is pretty broad. By the time you get into the industry, nothing fazes you.”

You’ll have to wait to see if Whatuira makes it onto the stage as a showgirl in the new six-part comedy-drama The Boy, the Queen and Everything In Between, which goes live today on TVNZ+.

The story centres on the complicated relationship between Whatuira’s character, Jacob, and his father, Max, who’s a famous drag queen on Karangahape Rd, the edgy inner-city strip and former red light district where much of the filming took place.

In the first episode, Jacob — who’s been estranged from his father during a three-year stint in prison — is released for good behaviour on the condition that he finds work within 14 days. Of course, things don’t go according to plan and he ends up getting a job at his dad’s club, where Hope, one of the showgirls, catches his eye.

Unapologetically earthy, just like the world it portrays, the series is no prurient take on a community that’s typically been either sidelined or fetishised by mainstream society. Creator Ramon Te Wake (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Whatua) was a transgender teenager when she first began playing the clubs on K’ Rd in the 90s as part of the MTV-inspired band Pure Funk.

Co-producer of TransGenerations, which won best web series at the Berlin Short Film Festival last year, she’s all over the credits for this one. The first project released through her production company, Lucky Legs Media, The Boy, The Queen was written and co-directed by Te Wake, who makes a cameo appearance as showgirl Shandy and wrote three of the original songs on the soundtrack, repurposed from an album she released a couple of decades ago.

Unlike Te Wake, much of the cast had no previous acting experience, other than being natural performers at heart. In keeping with a commitment to have takatāpui with lived experience representing all the queer characters, Max is played by Adam Dehar, better known as Wellington International Pride Parade founder and drag queen Amanduh La Whore.

In the equally pivotal role of Hope is trans actor, writer and director Awa Puna, whose recent screen appearances include a firebrand activist in the 2022 feature film Whina and a post-transition doctor on Shortland Street.

Whatuira, who’s been a professional actor for more than a decade, is one of the only straight guys on the show. That’s not specifically relevant to his character, though. He says Jacob’s sexuality is never defined, but he’s both attracted to Hope and intimidated by her.

“Me and Ramon had a conversation about that early on when we explored this romantic chemistry with Awa, because Jacob [who’s split from the mother of his young son] has only been with women before. But we didn’t want to lock down his sexuality or make it a thing.

“He was raised in the club, around the drag queens, and he absolutely loves the hell out of them. Ultimately it doesn’t work out with Hope, but I feel like Jacob is so comfortable with the world that once he becomes comfortable within himself, he’s sort of open to anyone, really.”

Whatuira (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa) was born in the UK, where his father was in the British military, but he and his three siblings grew up in Auckland near the naval base in Devonport.

Both his parents have mixed Māori and Pākehā ancestry, and straddling those two worlds hasn’t always been easy. That internal conflict over where cultural allegiance lies underpinned one of his most recent roles, in the supernatural series Beyond the Veil, where he plays a Māori soldier who returns from World War I to work as a butler for a rich Pākehā couple and has a passionate affair with the mistress of the house.

“Figuring out where exactly we stand has been interesting,” he says. “When we’re in Devonport, we’re Māori and then when we go back to the whenua, everyone views us as European. It’s always been like that for all four of us.”

A blindside flanker for North Shore Rugby — the club that spawned a generation of hard men, including Buck Shelford and Frano Botica — Whatuira captained the winning team in the 2023 North Harbour Premiership. Last year, the 29-year-old married his long-term girlfriend, Millie, on the beach at Mt Maunganui. The reception was held at the surf club and he wore a sand-coloured linen suit.

So, on paper at least, this is a guy who doesn’t read as particularly rainbow-adjacent. He’s still never been to a live drag show. When Whatuira turned up on set for the first day of filming, he was worried he might offend someone by saying or doing the wrong thing. The drag queens were nervous, too. What if he was … too straight?

It took a few days, he says, “but we all figured each other out. They embraced me and I embraced being there. We had so much fun shooting the show. I’d never really had much experience in those communities, but the way I approach a role — and that’s what I find so great about acting — is that there are aspects of me in every single character I play.”

Te Wake began working on The Boy, The Queen when she was bored and stuck at home during lockdown, a fertile time for creatives across the arts spectrum. She was playing trans activist Ellie on indie series Rūrangi when she first met Puna, a writer on the show, and knew right from the start that she’d be perfect as Hope.

After the initial auditions, a chemistry test with Puna and Whatuira was held at Te Wake’s apartment in the old George Court building, right in the heart of Karangahape Rd. They nailed it. “The two of them together was mwah,” she says. “You always hope you’ll find people who can embody the words in a way that just pours out of their body, not just their mouths.”

The drag queens are fabulous, of course — Te Wake reckons Sammy Salsa will be a shoo-in for Best Costume Design at next year’s New Zealand Television Awards. But for Te Wake, it’s not a gay or trans story. When she showed her mother a key scene between Max and Jacob, both of them cried. “Sure, you can kind of get lost in the gorgeousness of the queens,” she says. “The humour and the drama and the queenie-tanga is there, colouring the edges. But the healing of trauma and pain between a father and a son, that’s really the journey.

“The biggest message is that men need to talk more and communicate their feelings, in particular, Māori men. With Jacob, it’s like trying to crack through to find the vulnerability and yearning inside. Niwa positions himself so beautifully in that place where retreating to toxicity or anger is always in reach, but so is joy and happiness in equal measure.”

Whatuira has had a tumultuous relationship with his own father, whose staunch military background sat uneasily alongside his son’s creative aspirations. So it was a powerful moment when his father spoke at the wedding, acknowledging Whatuira’s decision to become an actor was the right one. “Oh, my God, I was crying the whole time. It was such an emotionally charged day,” he says. “It’s funny, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised — like Jacob does — that I’m actually a lot like my dad in so many ways. I’ve just gone down a different pathway.”

At primary school, Whatuira played the lead in a junior production and was hooked. The year after graduating from South Seas Film and Television School, he landed a part in the feature film The Dark Horse, alongside Cliff Curtis. Next he was signed for a TV show. “I thought, ‘This job’s easy! I got this sh*t. Then in 2014, I did one play. So I learned quite early that’s how it works, with all the ebbs and flows.”

This year, he’s on the incoming tide, with two new releases: Rule of Mum, part of TVNZ’s Mother Hood anthology series, and dark comedy Spinal Destination, as the husband of the lead character (played by Bree Peters) who suddenly loses the use of her legs. Also due out is the film adaptation of Wellington writer Carl Shuker’s terrific 2019 novel A Mistake, starring US actor Elizabeth Banks as a gifted surgeon caught up in the fallout when an operation goes horribly wrong. Written and directed by Christine Jeffs, its cast includes Fern Sutherland, Rena Owen, Joel Tobeck and Whatuira, as a bioethicist.

Te Wake has been busy in post-production for season two of Queer and Here and working on a documentary, Denied, celebrating 50+ years of gay pride. Whakaata Māori is interested in a second series of TransGenerations and the first episode of The Boy, The Queen and Everything In Between attracted international attention when it screened at the Rotorua Indigenous Film Festival in November.

K’ Rd has gentrified since she began performing on the strip with Raphael Thomson, her best friend from their high-school days in Porirua, Samoan fa’afafine artist Lindah Lepou and Niuean fakafifine Phylesha Brown-Acton, who joined Pure Funk when the group moved to Auckland in 1996. Te Wake describes The Boy, The Queen as a love letter to that time.

“It was such a hub back then with a real sense of sisterhood,” she says. “We had four or five clubs dedicated to queens and you’d watch them cross the road, going from one club to the next. It was just this beautiful dance. That queen culture has shifted and a lot of things are lost to the times, but I’ll always be in love with K’ Rd. There’s still that grittiness to it. And to me, this is where my sense of self began.”