From picking apples to the red carpet

Lydia Peckham first found her love of acting while at Nelson College for Girls. Now she is walking Hollywood’s red carpet and will soon star alongside silver screen royalty like Russell Crowe. She talks to Charles Anderson about her journey.

There was a moment when Lydia Peckham was perched in an apple tree overlooking the family orchard with a camera rigged up with a bungee cord, pretending to be an ape, when she wondered about her journey.

It had been a long road to get there, up that tree.

The Peckams moved to New Zealand when Lydia was eight years old. They had moved here from Scotland, where she lived with her two siblings and parents in a forest with no TV and where they were encouraged to go exploring.

“This is where we would explore in the woods and play out endless imaginary stories. It was here that my imagination was set alight.”

It was the University of Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival that was the catalyst in transitioning her passion to the reality of acting on stage.

In her final year at Nelson College for Girls she was selected to go to London and perform on the Globe stage; it was at that point that she felt this could be a valid career.

“I definitely fell in love with it. I've also always really been into clown and physical movement. I think there's something about stripping off yourself and stepping into a space where you can just play and be alive with an audience on that stage, there is an electricity running, both within you, and in the space that lives between you and the audience.”

Lydia says she had always been attracted to the offbeat. She enjoyed the quirkiness of performance, finding physicality from movement. She tested out different forms of acting but from those early days she always thought the stage was the place for her.

By the time she finished school there was a decision to be made. Should she opt for a ‘safe’ career, or should she follow her passion for acting. She liked cider but didn’t want to follow in her parent’s footsteps to be a cider maker. There wasn’t a right choice, but there was a choice to be made.

“I was thinking, ‘Should I go back to England and try to make things work in a bigger space?’ At the time, my boyfriend was going to LA, so I was thinking, ‘Should I go to Hollywood and try to get into a drama school there?’”

She decided to attend New Zealand's preeminent acting school, Toi Whakaari. It’s a path well-trodden by aspiring actors across the country, and it was there she learned the hustle of what it might mean to be a professional performer.

“It teaches you to step into your own voice as a creator. It was a school that asked, ‘How do you make a living in New Zealand when there isn’t the same amount of content as in America?’ It’s about making your own work and thinking outside the box.”

As graduation neared, the collective nerves from her class was palpable. There were people who were getting roles in professional shows across the country. But Lydia learned early on that if you start to compare then you are doomed to a downward spiral. Her journey had an early introduction into the fickle brutality of the industry.

Lydia had been awarded the Museum Art Hotel scholarship in her final year at Toi Whakaari. She had been scouted and signed on by leading New Zealand agent, Johnson and Laird.

She was cast in Why Does Love, a biopic about The Exponents. She filmed it. It was exciting. This was it, her first foray into a world she had envisioned since she was a teenager. Then, the part got cut.

She acted in short films, moved to Auckland and got a job at a café to pay the rent. She worked in supermarkets offering brand new cheeses to sometimes less-than enthused customers. But there were also lessons in that too.

“What that taught me is that, if I could give any advice to actors or artists, it’s to try and find a life outside of your craft that makes you happy. Because if you let acting define your journey in life, it’s not going to be sustainable. It’s not going to feed into the work.”

So to that end, her and her partner William bought a campervan. She quit her jobs and she prioritised life. They travelled and explored the country, working remotely from the van. And then, suddenly, jobs started coming. Lydia would conduct auditions in the van, and if she booked a role, would drive to the airport to fly out to wherever she was needed. That was when Cowboy Bebop happened, a role in a Netflix original, filmed in New Zealand. It was about a ragtag group of bounty hunters chasing down criminals across the Solar System on the Bebop spaceship.

Then more things began happening.

She landed a role in 2019 in the film Only Cloud Knows, a New Zealand-Chinese production, filmed in Central Otago and directed by Xiaogang Feng, a renowned director in China.

“There was such excitement in thinking, ‘Is this the precipice of the shift?’ I think a dream for an actor is that work comes to you and that you then have the freedom to make creative choices.”

The film premiered in China and Lydia did a press tour across the biggest cities there. Jackie Chan attended.

“It was all high rolling… and then I got back and literally two weeks later Covid hit and everything went into lockdown.”

The world stopped. And along with that, much of the entertainment industry. From high rolling to lockdown. Lydia moved back to Nelson to help out on the orchard, which was classified as an essential industry. From the red carpet to picking apples.

“And here I was in the reality of real life, acting and career pushed to the side but lucky enough to be spending so much time with my family and a beautiful orchard to lock down in.”

Lydia kept her creative muscle active by writing and performing skits online. She and her sister Scarlett wrote a show that was then performed at BATS theatre in Wellington when Covid levels eased.

It was a year later that an audition came through. It was for the fourth instalment of the Planet of the Apes reboot. It was an audition for an ape. The script had some words but it was more focussed on physical movement. They didn't want someone overcompensating or pretending to be an ape. They wanted embodiment.

Lydia looked around and thought a traditional blank wall would not quite suffice for the task. So she climbed a tall tree, strung up a camera with a bungee cord and moved around the branches with the sunlight peeking through the leaves and the wind in her hair. The result was… impressive. She sent it out.

“Off into the abyss and maybe you hear back in four months, maybe you don’t hear back at all, or perhaps tomorrow.”

A month later, Lydia got a call from her agent saying the director Wes Ball loved it and wanted to meet. So they did. For an hour they conversed about seemingly everything other than the advent of an ape species that takes over Earth. Then, just like that, she had the job. Soon she would be Soona, a young chimpanzee. Her and her partner packed their bags and flew out to Sydney to begin production.

The film takes place 300 years after the events of War and follows a young chimpanzee named Noa, who embarks on a journey alongside a human woman named Mae to determine the future for apes and humans alike.

But before that, Lydia had to go to ‘ape school’. For six weeks she and her fellow actors had a crash course on how to become an ape. They trained with Alain Gauthier, choreographer from Cirque du Soleil.

“The first day we turned up, and he said, ‘Okay, I want you to find different spaces that have energy. So I want you to find a space in the room that has a dark energy and then you move your body to get into the shape of what that energy feels to you and your body.’”

It brought back her drama school days. “Really it was about stripping your human essence and stripping your mind and trying to become present in your body and in your being… So it was a lot about learning to let go of everything in a way which was amazing.”

By the time she finished, Lydia says she looked at her castmates as fellow apes. Then, finally, it was time for filming with some of the most advanced motion capture technology around. Lydia was placed in a bodysuit, dots all over her body and a camera attached to a headset to capture her facial expressions. The technology then rendered out a virtual twin of her performance, which 3D artists could begin layering onto her ape exterior.

But it wasn’t until the premiere at the famed Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard that she got to see her transformation.

“The premiere was a whirlwind of an experience. You turn up and there's all these people who are shouting your name, asking for your autograph. You're like ‘how do you know who I am?’ You get ushered through the crowds and then you get like, thrown, suddenly you’re on the red carpet with so many cameras in front of you.”

It was a moment that actors dream of. One that Lydia had dreamed about. But it was hard to take it all in. “It's electric, it's adrenaline, there's so much energy going on all around you.”

Lydia had flown to the ‘Apes’ premiere in Los Angeles from Budapest, where she was filming another film, Nuremberg. A very different experience from her previous role, this film is about the Nuremberg trials and stars Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.

“People say overnight success takes seven years, and actually is a series of small steps along the way. Looking back, Nelson, the people there and the opportunities I was given really allowed me to travel along this road.”

A step that started in Nelson, with Lydia performing Romeo and Juliet. What would that Lydia think of all this?

“You know, it sounds glamorous here, but it's been years of hustle and there's been numerous points where nothing's happened… That's why I talk about honouring life and not putting judgment on whether you're succeeding or not at that time. It's just I think, keep it sustainable, laugh often, and keep going.”