Jemaine Clement is once again preparing to embrace what he calls his dreaded “writer’s body.”
After a self-imposed writing hiatus, the New Zealand multihyphenate — arguably still best known with Bret McKenzie as one half of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords — is ready to return to the shadows of the dark office and the fears of the blank page. He has a TV project set up — a comedy sci-fi series, “which I’m not allowed to say anything about,” that he’ll begin writing “as soon as the deal gets done.”
But before he puts pen to paper, Clement is bracing for the side effects. Writing, he admits, does a number on him. “For writer-performers, there’s your acting body, and there’s your writing body,” he explains. “When I’m writing, my skin’s like gray, I put on weight. It’s totally different. With acting, only the first day is stressful. Writing is stressful all the time. I love it. But my writing body is a mess.”
Clement stepped away from writing after an intense, back-to-back stretch of TV projects, including Wellington Paranormal, What We Do in the Shadows (the small-screen spin on his 2014 vampire mockumentary with Taika Waititi), and Apple TV’s Time Bandits. “It was too much,” he admits. “I only wrote the first two seasons of What We Do in the Shadows, but I was doing Wellington Paranormal at the same time. I’d have 10 episodes of one to rewrite or review, and six of the other. And neither producer cared that I was already running another show.”
