Tom Sainsbury: Comedy, Characters & Children

Comedian Tom Sainsbury talks making movies, his social media characters, and the two children he helped bring into the world.

Tom Sainsbury is a man of many faces, from his social media characters to his true crime podcast host persona and more recently feature film maker and star.

He talks to Anika Moa about the trajectory of his life on screen and the personal highlights and lowlights along the way.

Watch the video version of the episode here

Grassroots beginnings

"People assume it was a lot tougher than it was. The thing is that there's a thriving amateur dramatic society in Matamata. So pretty early on, I kind of discovered this as an avenue and found my people."

"I auditioned for drama school and failed miserably. I was just so ill prepared. And I argued with the person doing the audition about the acoustics of the place. Like why did I do that? My soul still cringes about it."

"I worked the traps and I would hang out with all these actors, lots of them still doing acting now. But they were all very kind of serious about it and they held up Robert De Niro as their kind of hero and stuff like that. And it wasn't until and I thought maybe this isn't for me this acting style. And it was twice to hang out with your Morgana O'Reilly's and your Madeleine Sami's and stuff.

The move into podcasts

"I've spent a lot of time listening to true crime podcasts. So, like S Town, Serial, those kind of ones. I was so aware of the tropes, I was like, this would be great for a parody. So I've done Small Town Scandal, where I play all the characters in the town, and it's solving the mystery of who killed the main character. His uncle's the richest man in town, and his body's found kind of torn up by automated lawnmower"

Feature Films

There's a competition called the 48hour film competition and we won it in 2016 and then again in 2018. So we had this kind of prize money that we could do something with and it would have been a really good short film, but we were like, let's make a feature film. And so we started writing it back then, and then just slowly and surely, once you get other people involved and suddenly you've got deadlines, suddenly a film is getting made. and then we finished it in 2022, but we decided to kind of hold it and release it as part of the New Zealand Film Festival.

Social Media…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details