Willa O'Neill
Willa O'Neill began appearing in musicals around the age of eight. She still vividly remembers the day she came home from school in Hamilton, turned on the TV, and suddenly realised there were people who worked in television for a job. "It was a wonder to me that this was someone's life, they did this for several hours a day." Thinking that there would always be "room for entertainment", she decided to become an entertainer."
At high school she began working in community theatres. From the start she loved acting, “I used to absolutely adore it. It was the dream thing. I never wanted to do anything else.” She got together with friends to make a number of short films on video, as well as a Western that ran for 70 minutes. After leaving school and finding an agent in Auckland, she got parts in Shortland Street, the acclaimed An Angel at my Table, and the sitcom version of The Billy T James Show.
In 1992 O'Neill was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress award from the Australian Film Institute, for her role in trans-tasman production Secrets (1992). O'Neill plays a young hairdresser in a horrendous hair-do, who gets trapped in a hotel basement with other Beatles fans, when the fab four hit town. Written by Jan Sardi — later Oscar-nominated for Shine — the movie saw her acting alongside Australians Noah Taylor and Danii Minogue. Although set in Melbourne, Secrets was largely shot at Lower Hutt's Avalon studios.
In 1995 O'Neill won an NZ Film and TV Award, after starring as a teenage mother in an episode of docudrama series True Life Stories. Soon after, she joined the cast of a no-budget weekend project initiated by writer/director Harry Sinclair. The project eventually found its way onto television screens in a series of bite-sized segments, as Topless Women Talk about their Lives.
Her role as Prue was later slightly retooled for the feature film of the same name. The project offered a loose riff on modern relationships. Prue is cheerful and selfless, but her concern for the well-being of others causes conflict with her Niuean husband Mike. The movie version of Topless Women won O'Neill the Best Supporting Actress award at the 1997 NZ Film and Television awards. In 2000 she reteamed with Topless director Sinclair and castmember Danielle Cormack for The Price of Milk – his time playing a misguided drifter, unaware of how much chaos she's creating.
The mid-90s saw O'Neill alternating the urban Auckland stories of Topless Women with ventures into ancient Greece. In the first episode of the long-running Xena: Warrior Princess she played the sister of Xena's sidekick Gabrielle, and> xx she reprised the role in later episodes. O’Neil was asked to lose weight for the role and given a gym membership. As she said “I didn't give two hoots about their problem with my weight”. She returned two weeks later. “After not doing any of what they wanted me to do, people said ‘Willa, you look amazing! Wow! What a transformation!’".
Another role was created for her on the Xena companion show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, as "an Amazon girl with knives and boots – that was cool". O'Neill's work on Hercules would win her a Best Supporting Actress prize at 1999's local screen awards.
O'Neill has also appeared in historical television series Greenstone (1999), and The Chosen, a 1998 miniseries about a cult leader and a troubled priest. The same year she guest-starred in the second episode of cult series Back of the Y, and fronted Endangered Species, a documentary on a cause close to her heart: creating a quota to get more local content on television.
O'Neill's theatre work had seen her producing two shows for writer Duncan Sarkies. In 1999 she signed on to appear in ‘comedy thriller' Scarfies, after being impressed by the "watertight" script written by Duncan and his brother, director Robert Sarkies.
O'Neill played Emma, a good-humoured law student who moves into a rundown Dunedin flat, only to find herself caught up in complications criminal, moral and romantic. The night after finishing work on Scarfies, O'Neill flew back to Auckland so she could begin working the next morning on an episode of Hercules. Scarfies would win O'Neill a best actor award at the NZ Film and Television awards in 2000.
Scarfies proved a solid commercial and critical success. A number of Kiwi critics, including Herald critic Russell Baillie, praised the strength of the film's young ensemble cast. Variety's David Rooney made a point of mentioning O'Neill in his review. "Perhaps due to the fact that her character shows the greatest emotional range, O'Neill stands out in the delightful ensemble".
On the heels of the Scarfies festival circuit, O’Neil announced she would be leaving screen acting to focus on jazz singing and theatre directing, which she had already been working on in the years prior. Shortly following her departure from the screen in 2000, her sixth play Love and Cultery written by Kate McDermot played in Auckland. She said that her years acting had given her “the skills for the stuff I’m doing now . . . I see a future in directing”. As a jazz singer, she preformed with Jan Hellriegel and Caitlin Smith as Diva International.
Almost 15 years later O’Neill made a return to the screen with roles in comedy series Step-Dave (2014), and two shorts, The December Shipment (2015) and Silence (2021). She continues to direct theatre in Auckland.
Profile updated on 23 April 2024
Sources Include
Jo McCarroll, ‘A topless woman talks about her life after acting’ - The Sunday Star-Times, 3 December 2000
Cathy Pope, ‘Willa Cameron: Real women Real words’ - Cathy Pope website. Loaded 9 August 2017. Accessed 23 April 2024
David Rooney, 'Scarfies' (Review) - Variety, 10 June 1999. Accessed 9 April 2024
Bret Ryan Rudnick, 'An Interview With Willa O'Neill' Woosh! (website), Loaded January 2000. Accessed 23 April 2024
Unknown writer, ‘Cool jazz at vineyard’ - The Nelson Mail, 6 December 2000
Unknown writer, ‘Scarfies has film awards wrapped up’ - The Sunday Star-Times, 2 July 2000