‘This never happens': Bailey Poching on getting cast in Netflix's North of North

The comedian and actor takes us through his life in television.
It was on a Monday morning that actor and comedian Bailey Poching recorded his audition for Netflix's North of North, describing himself as being 'a hair's breadth' from throwing in the towel and heading back into hospitality. He sent his tape in, and got a reply that afternoon asking if he could audition in his own accent. By Tuesday, he had a Zoom meeting with Netflix and the showrunners. By Wednesday, he had got the job. Less than a week later, he was shooting his first scene in the Arctic Canadian territory of Nunavut in -40 degree conditions.
'I think I'll be telling that story for the rest of my life,' Poching laughs. 'It was like trying to appreciate the feeling of winning the lottery in real time. We romanticise this happening, but this never happens for actors.' For the next three months, Poching played Colin, a radio DJ looking to find love in the arctic circle in Netflix's first Canadian production – and the first show of its kind to be centered around the indigenous Inuk community. 'It felt like capturing something really special, and it was really cool to be even peripheral to that,' he says.
Poching, who is Māori and Samoan, says he learned a lot about story sovereignty from being a part of the groundbreaking series. 'I remember asking the showrunners for advice on making indigenous TV shows and they were like 'you will have an easier time, because at least there's a precedent for indigenous film and TV in New Zealand',' he says. 'There was a sense of reckoning with the fact that, in our position as Pacific and Māori storytellers, we do have more opportunities than some of our indigenous whānau around the world to make television – even if there's still not heaps.'
Closer to home, Poching is a part of another important onscreen kōrero in Don't, TVNZ's new big issue comedy series. In it, comedian Bubbah is joined by a host of funny friends to interrogate the big issues facing rangatahi today. Poching's episode is all about marriage, including interviewing university students and rest home residents alike about their attitudes towards it. 'The title is quite provocative, but Don't really holds space for so many different cultural and social perspectives on what marriage represents, the origins of it and how we feel about it now,' he says. 'There's no sense of judgment in it at all.'
A lot of that, he says, comes down to host Bubbah's own curiosity about the world. 'She has such an interesting lens and so much to say, but she's also an incredible listener.' Taking a leaf out of the beloved comedian's book, we carefully listened to Poching's eclectic life in television, including Scottish Wipe Out for kids and how Coca-Cola made him famous in Australia.
My earliest TV memory is… I spent the first 19 years of my life in the UK, and so my TV memories are of CBBC, the children's BBC channel, and a show called Balamory. The jingle really sticks in my head – ' what's the story in Balamory, wouldn't you like to know?' It's one of those things that I'll say to myself, but then people here don't really know what I'm talking about. We also had lots of VHS tapes of The Wiggles, and they did a crossover episode with the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin. It was like Avengers: Endgame.
The show I would rush home from school to watch was… I watched so much TV as a kid. Superhero cartoons were huge for me – X Men, Spider Man, Fantastic Four. There was a game show called Raven that was like Wipe Out, but fantasy themed and for kids. The host was called Raven and he wore a feathered cloak and had a big staff. If a kid failed a challenge, he would like place his staff on the kid's shoulder, and then they disappeared. It was the most terrifying thing – that kid just applied to be on a TV show, now he's vanished.
My first time on television was… A Coca-Cola commercial, just before Covid. I was playing an Uber Eats driver and I appear for two seconds at the end. Honestly, because of the way TV commercials work, that really helped me out through Covid. I didn't realise it played in Australia as well, so I had family sending me photos and it was a huge moment of pride. Now, I don't know how I would feel about doing a Coca-Cola commercial, but I needed that at the time.
My favourite NZ TV ad is… This was such a phenomenon for me moving here, when I realised that a lot of these local ads have vice-like grip on people of a certain generation. I remember Ghost Chips was huge on YouTube. The 'do it yourself' kid tradies were also pretty big in my house because I have a dad who grew up in New Zealand and a mum who grew up in Australia. Any kind of recognition of those two countries was always nice.
My TV guilty pleasure is… Any YouTube show where celebrities eat food, so things like Hot Ones and the Angela Hartnett and Nick Grimshaw podcast Dish. I'll line up a bunch of those while I'm making food or cleaning up and just watch celebrities eating food. I love food, and I'm interested in celebrities as well. They are kind of like the modern talk show.
A TV moment that haunts me is… Anything from the David Tennant Doctor Who era, which had a lot of really scary stuff in it. I remember there were these monsters that had pig faces and human bodies, or one big brain with a single eye and all these tentacles. It traumatised me – I asked my brother to wait outside the bathroom while I was showering, because I was so scared.
My favourite TV character is… Mark Corrigan from Peep Show. Word for word, some of the funniest dialogue maybe ever put on television. I have a deep affection and appreciation for cringe humour and he's a character whose whole purpose is putting his foot in his mouth while also having that common trope of unearned confidence and being so certain of himself. He's so smart, he's done everything he was told to do growing up, and he's still a failure. It's so poetically funny.
My favourite TV project I've ever been involved in is… North of North is a very special one because of the indigenous kaupapa. It feels like such a triumph to have that story on TV, and to be even peripheral to it was such an honour. But I have to make a special mention to Kid Sister, because Simone Nathan was kind enough to give me that opportunity and I had a blast.
A TV project I wish I could be involved in is… I always romanticise the lifestyle of an SNL writer, where you pitch on Monday, and then you're up all Tuesday night writing the silliest stuff. And I feel like I've seen a picture of Bobby Moynihan smoking a cigarette out a window and they're all there with Bill Hader and Seth Meyers. This idea of working with your closest, funniest friends would be my dream. That, or doing a voice on a superhero cartoon.
My controversial TV opinion is… We should be making weirder television and taking more creative risks. I think there's so much space for us to explore the weirder stories of New Zealand, rather than packaging up something neat for a global audience. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies and dark little stories for us to tell, and not just in the grim murder mystery way. I think there's so much to explore still in our underrepresented communities, and I dream of seeing abstract, surreal, artistic television made here.
A TV show I will never watch, no matter how many people tell me I should is… The White Lotus is becoming that for me. I remember, with season one, seeing that it was a show about privilege, set in Hawaii, and that was the cast? I think this trend of shows about people with too much privilege is hopefully curving downward, because the more seasons it gets, the more it's too much homework now to catch up on. I'm sure it's actually incredible, but something about that initial idea turned me away from it.
The last thing I watched on television was… The first season of Severance, which was really good. I got told to catch up before season two started, so I watched the whole of season one on a plane and it was gripping – I was totally locked in. Interesting craft, interesting filmmaking decisions, interesting writing decisions, and all just carried by great performance and production design. Well-crafted TV.

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Photo: Supplied Kōkā stood in deliberate contrast to earlier portrayals of Māori in films like Once Were Warriors , Akuhata-Brown said. Released in 1994 and directed by Lee Tamahori, Once Were Warriors follows an urban Māori whānau living in South Auckland and their problems with poverty, domestic violence, and alcoholism, caused by intergenerational trauma, racism, and systemic land loss. "The intention was to bring elements of healing into the work, to ensure that when people come away from it, they're not traumatised. Because I am so sick of traumatising films," Akuhata-Brown said. She said the current political climate made it more important than ever to share Māori stories. "I think if you look through history, the greatest storytellers emerge in the darkest periods. Not just in te ao Māori, but across the world. "Artists are the soul of the nation. And our souls need some help right now." 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Hamo does karakia, and during that whole process, Jo, who has come into this place bruised and battered, is healed," Dell said. Jo's character was inspired by a real person Akuhata-Brown once met, a young Māori man who had been institutionalised, released into the community, and left to "survive on his own". "He lived under the Grafton Bridge and used to read the newspaper to see who had passed away, then turn up to their tangi," she said. "He had no filters, it was quite full on. People were nervous around him. I thought to myself, he's not long for this world. Three years later, his body was found in a ditch." Akuhata-Brown said she couldn't stop thinking about him. "My Jo in the film is that Joe. It's to honour him and his life when no one else did." She said the character served as a reminder of the realities some Māori still face. "All I know is that someone's life has been given that's the truth." Darneen Christian (Tūhoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Pitcairn Island), plays Jo, the disconnected and troubled kōtiro in Kōkā. Photo: Damien Nikora / graded and delivered by Kirsty Griffin Darneen Christian (Tūhoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Pitcairn Island), who plays Jo, said the production was both challenging and rewarding. "I love that it's touching people who don't know their whakapapa and their culture. It's touching a lot of things people are starting to finally be passionate about and trying to work on." Like her character, Christian said she had been distant from her Māori whakapapa. But being on set helped her reconnect. "I teared up at one of our rehearsals and said I can't communicate with you in the language. Everyone was so supportive, I realised I wasn't going to be looked down on." The film's alignment with Matariki made the experience more meaningful. "It's a time to release and start again... to leave what has happened behind and welcome what's new." Dell said the journey of understanding Matariki had also evolved for her. "Matariki is a word that's very familiar to me in terms of haka and waiata," Dell said. "Prior to that, we didn't really understand what Matariki really meant until today. The research in terms of Matariki has been instrumental in developing us as a people to go forward." Actor Te Kohe Tuhaka (Ngāti Porou, Tūhoe), pictured on the right, plays Marcus in the film, a police officer who acts as a protector to Hamo. Photo: Supplied Kōkā was the first feature film to be shot predominantly in the Ngāti Porou dialect. The dialogue was developed with local kaumātua, language experts, and Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Porou. Akuhata-Brown said the language spanned generations, from modern-day reo to expressions once used by Māori Battalion soldiers. "The language of women is different to the language of men and there's even a Ngāti Porou language of love," she said. "It's a full range of te reo and it was incredibly important to the filmmaking team that the language create a tapestry of beauty and gorgeousness. I haven't dared touch it." Actor Te Kohe Tuhaka (Ngāti Porou, Tūhoe), known widely in Aotearoa for his role in The Dead Lands , plays Marcus in the film, a police officer who acts as a protector to Hamo. He said Kōkā' s use of reo is empowering but "normal." "I grew up in a period where I just thought everybody spoke te reo Māori, and English was second, everybody's second language. Which is not the case. Case in point to the current government. "Everything about te ao Māori is a very normalised thing in my life. That is not to say that I am an expert in any of it. I just know what I know, and I've grown how I've grown." Tuhaka said an important part of the film is exploring the universal challenges Māori still face today. "We touch on poverty, we touch on low socio-economic spaces, we touch on the role of the police in the community, we look at the journey of Māori returning back to their maunga, their awa, our versions of manaakitanga. "The landscape is another massive character and touchstone for us in Kōkā ." He said all of these practices and kaupapa exist now. "To be able to shine a bit of Matariki light, me Puanga, ki runga i ēnei tū āhuatanga, it feels fitting as we head towards our release in Matariki weekend." Kōkā follows a healing journey of two wāhine - a kuia named Hamo and a troubled young woman, Jo - who form an 'unlikely' bond on a road trip across Aotearoa. Photo: Supplied / Kōkā trailer Filming took place across Te Wai Pounamu, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and the East Cape - but it was Akuhata-Brown's awa and maunga that anchored the story. "It couldn't be told anywhere else," she said. The title Kōkā is specific to Ngāti Porou and is a shortened form of Waiapu Kōkā Huhua, referring to the ancestral Waiapu River. It can be translated to "matriarch" or "mother of us all". "It reflects all those female aspects - not just one," Akuhata-Brown said. "Along the Waiapu riverbanks are marae often led by chiefly women, nurturing all the people who live there." "The river's flow mirrors the story structure, with all rivers joining the central character Hamo on her journey out to sea," she said. Akuhata-Brown says the time is "now" for more Māori storytelling. Photo: Supplied All of the film's actors offered words of encouragement to rangatahi, wāhine, and Māori wanting to enter the film industry. Tuhaka said it was important for aspiring creatives to understand their purpose. "You have to really know why. Why this industry? Why this craft?" he said. "We're lucky here in Aotearoa that it's not foreign to dabble in a whole raft of things, in front of the camera, behind the camera. But it's about understanding the 'why' because you'll get more noes than yeses, and the why is what gets you through the no's and lets you really celebrate the yeses," Tuhaka said. "Kia kaha, kia māia, kia manawanui. "If this is something you want, go for it. Make mistakes, stand up, and carry on," Dell said. Christian said the time was right for more Māori voices in film. "This is the time. The pot's boiling for the right time to start jumping in." Kōkā premieres across Aotearoa this Matariki, Friday, 20 June.