Watching Kiwi superstar Morgana O’Reilly goofing round at a photoshoot with Tom Sainsbury, the affection between them is obvious. Yet despite being close mates for many years, the White Lotus actress says her old mate is almost too busy for her these days.
“Tom is a notoriously hard man to get a hold of,” Morgana, 40, tells Woman’s Day.
“If I want to hang out with him, I have to work with him, which is why I said yes to his show!”
As Katie in Tom’s brilliant new comedy Small Town Scandal, she gets to play a moderately unhinged dreamer who also may or may not be a killer. Based on Tom’s side-splitting podcast of the same name, in which he voiced all the characters, the small-screen adaptation is even funnier.
“In the TV version, I just play Toby, a journalist who has returned to his hometown of Te Hōiho after being fired from the small newspaper he worked on in Australia,” explains Tom, 43.
“Toby has only been home a short time and he’s back living with his mum [played by UK superstar Felicity Kendal] when his uncle Mitch is found shredded on his lawn, the victim of his own invention, a robot motor mower.”
Toby’s suspicion sparks a podcast
Although the creepy local cops call it an accident, Toby smells a rat and starts making a podcast to understand who killed his millionaire uncle. As Tom and Morgana pose for our photos, they reminisce about how their friendship began almost 20 years ago as starstruck young thespians hustling for work in Auckland. Tom recalls how he felt watching future Hollywood star Morgana, then still at drama school, do a performance piece at the Auckland Art Gallery.
“She was playing an old woman and I was like, ‘Who is this amazing actor?!’”
Fast-forward to 2008 and a chance meeting on the steps at Auckland’s Basement Theatre saw the comedian cast Morgana in a play he was directing called Luv.
“She was wearing these big hoop earrings and I was nervous as anything, thinking she’d just turn me down, but she said she’d read my script.”
Morgana laughs, “Back then, when anybody asked me to do something, I never read the script – I just said yes!”
After that first collaboration, their friendship blossomed and they went on to make “lots of theatre”, tells Tom.
“Until then, I’d been working with very serious, earnest actors, but Morgana approached things completely differently. Playing big characters, she’d start with silly shoes and hair, but these people still held lots of truth. It revolutionised the way I thought.”
When the OE made them a family
A year later, their friendship deepened when they were both on their OEs.
“It was 2009 and the first place I went to was London, which is where Tom was,” explains Morgana.
“Bless him, he gave me and his cousin his tiny little room in Tottenham Hale, then he moved somewhere else so we’d have a place to stay. We’ve had some wicked times together. We always fall into this absolute vortex of giggling!”
Making it big and staying grounded
While in London, the young actors were doing all sorts to get by, but today they’re both household names, with Mean Mums and Neighbours star Morgana catapulting to international fame in the third series of The White Lotus, and social media sensation Tom scoring 218,000 followers on Instagram and about to embark on a stand-up tour of Australia.
Yet no matter how successful they get, their friendship anchors them.
“This might sound sycophantic, but I messaged Tom from Thailand when I was doing White Lotus to tell him that Mike White, the director, reminded me of him – they both love actors and they love what actors bring to the work, which is such a gift.”
No plan B needed
Asked what their younger selves would make of their meteoric rise, Morgana replies, “I never had a back-up plan as I knew this would happen. I just wish it hadn’t taken so long.”
Reflecting on his childhood in rural Waikato, where amateur theatre was his jam, Tom adds, “What would young Tom from Matamata say? This is not exactly what he imagined as he expected to be a serious dramatic actor, but being on TV and working with Felicity Kendal would’ve absolutely blown my mind. I still can’t compute being paid to be silly because it’s that much fun. It’s bonkers.”
Standing nearby in her undies, as she changes from one pretty dress into another, Morgana calls out, “I just have to say that Tom is a joy to work with. He makes everyone around him feel loved and listened to. You’ll often walk away from a conversation with him and realise you’ve just told Tom everything about yourself because he wants to know about you. “He doesn’t do that as a means of deception, but because he genuinely finds people interesting. He’s also diligent – an artist who just has to create, tell stories and write. I love all that about Tom.”
When laughter steals the scene
Blushing, Tom says, “Well, I was also thinking about how much I love Morgana as I was coming to the shoot. She is a born entertainer. Everything is a gag or a show to her – she just switches it on. “In Small Town Scandal, there’s one scene where Morgana is seducing me in the car. It was so hot that day and we became delirious. I was in hysterics. Never have I laughed so much because even if the world is crumbling around us, Morgana will be cracking jokes. But the best thing is that she’s a gorgeous actress and a gorgeous person.”
And with that, Morgana swishes her dress above her head, flashing her knickers and causing the pair to crack up all over again.
Small Town Scandal streams from Monday 9 February on Neon and Sky Comedy.
