Anzac Wallace gave one great performance, as Te Wheke in Utu, and built it out of stillness: a low voice and a level stare in a film where everyone else is shouting. The parts that followed were smaller, and none of them asked as much of him.
Fi1m perspective
Te Wheke walks into a settlers' church in Utu (1983), takes the pulpit from the vicar and preaches, in the vicar's own cadence, about what the Bible says on payment for wrongs. Anzac Wallace does it quietly. He does almost everything quietly: a slow walk, a level stare, a voice that stays low while the soldiers and settlers around him raise theirs. Martyn Sanderson's vicar is so polite and Wallace so gentle that we sat waiting for the film to let us off, and it did not. We were horrified, and it was the calm that did it.
He had no training and almost no acting behind him when Merata Mita recommended him to Geoff Murphy. He had worked in earthmoving and as a trade union organiser, and when he read the script he said the anger and frustration in it could have been his own; only the attitude to revenge would have been different. That is the performance in a sentence. Wallace is not playing rage; he is holding it, and the film is about how long a man can hold it and what happens when he stops.
The parts that followed were supporting ones. Yvonne Mackay's The Silent One (1984), Murphy's The Quiet Earth (1985) alongside Bruno Lawrence again, Dangerous Orphans (1986), and Mita's Mauri (1988), a film about identity, community and return, and the one time after Utu that a director built something around what he could do. Then Rapa Nui (1994), an international production shot on Easter Island, which drew little attention, and television, and a move to Australia. He came back to New Zealand around 2013, made a few more appearances, and died on 8 April 2019.
Directors kept casting him as the leader, the elder, the man everyone else defers to, and it is easy to see why. He looks like someone people would follow, and he looks like someone who has decided something before the scene began. The best of Utu is his scenes with Wi Kuki Kaa's Wiremu, the Māori corporal in a government uniform: two men who know exactly what the other has chosen, saying little, and the film's whole argument is made in their faces. That is a rare gift and it does not need a script to help it. It does need a director willing to hold the shot, and after Murphy and Mita few did.
See Utu, and see it for him. It is lumpy and it is alive. Wallace was a leading man for one film, and it was the right film, and it is worth wondering, as it plays, what else he might have carried if anyone had asked.
Biography
Anzac Wallace, also known as Zac Wallace and born Norman Pene Rewiri, was a New Zealand actor. He is best known for his leading role as Te Wheke in the 1983 film Utu.
Wallace appeared as Api's Mate in The Quiet Earth (1985). His other screen credits include The Silent One (1984), Mauri (1988) and Rapa Nui (1994) as Haoa. A former trade union delegate with little prior acting experience, he was cast in Utu after being spotted by director Geoff Murphy.
Wallace died on 8 April 2019.
