Close to home: Simone Nathan and Paul Williams in Kid Sister.
Simone Nathan has to think for a while when the Listener asks about her first experience of others performing her work. She recalls that, while studying for her master's degree in drama writing at Tisch, New York University's school of the arts, students from the acting department would come in and perform her and her classmates' scripts. It was, she says, either amazing or horrible.
But then she recalls with a laugh the sketches and songs she wrote for her Auckland Bnei Akiva Jewish youth group camps as a teenager. Ones which came with titles like "Winnie the Jew" and "The Avenjews" and "The Zion King".
"Those camps are definitely a good place to start your Jewish pun comedy," she says.
The likes of Sacha Baron Cohen and Seth Rogen started performing at their respective Habonim Dror Zionist youth camps. But for Nathan, the goal from an early age was screenwriting, not performing or making films.
"A lot of the stories that you hear from screenwriters are 'I didn't even know screenwriting was a job. I always knew. Maybe it's just that Jews know screenwriting is a job. Pretty singularly, since I was a kid, I was trying to do this."
Post-Tisch, that ambition has taken her into the writing rooms for Netflix series Bloodline (as a writer's assistant) and the Taika Waititi-Rhys Darby HBO pirate romcom Our Flag Means Death (she wrote the pivotal episode six).
This story is from the May 28 - June 3, 2022 edition of New Zealand Listener.
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This story is from the May 28 - June 3, 2022 edition of New Zealand Listener.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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