Page 5 - Hawaii Island MidWeek - Sep 1 2021

Actress Takes Her ‘Shot In The Dark’ With Podcast
FROM PAGE 4
Ultimately, Callies won the debate and Parrish, a former Kāne‘ohe resident, got the role of Hawaiian activist.
Amazingly, some cast members were willing to go to even greater lengths to ensure the job was done right. For example, Rockmond Dunbar (Prison Break, Sons of Anar- chy) chose to do his recordings from the trunk of his car.
“To be honest, I didn’t re- ally know if anybody would listen. It was kind of a shot in the dark. I think the thing that people seem to be responding to is how immersive it is. Of- ten when you say podcast to people, they think, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a couple of people chatting in my ear and I’m just listening in on a conversation.’
Not that the accomplished actress is complaining about a career that not only pays the bills, but allows her to experiment in new fields of entertainment such as scripted podcasts.
To complete the podcast’s recordings, sessions were held in New York and LA. Most re- cordings, however, had to be done remotely due to corona- virus restrictions and actors’ schedules. To work around these issues, Callies would send a microphone via Federal Express to the actors’ homes or wherever they happened to be at the time. (Gabrielle, in fact, finished her recordings from 5,000 miles away in Germa- ny.)
“Rockmond has four young children and they’re all home- schooling, so he chose to lock himself in the car because it was the only place where he could get peace and quiet,” recalls a chuckling Callies. “When we were done, he said, ‘Now I gotta text my wife and have her pop the trunk!’”
“But scripted podcasts are much more of a niche thing ... almost underground,” she continues. “I think the experi- ence is new for a lot of people.
Although she still makes frequent visits to Hawai‘i with her husband, Josh Winterhalt, and their two children, Callies confesses to missing the is- lands terribly. Thankfully, she hasn’t lost her pidgin accent — “Eh, Russell! You get pen?” she cracks while reminiscing about growing up in the era of comedians Rap Reiplinger and Frank De Lima — neither has she forgotten how Hawai‘i was the fertile ground upon which she grew her talents in the performing arts (even though she didn’t seriously
“Initially, I sort of thought that I would follow in my mom’s footsteps, get a Ph.D. and become a professor. But it really wasn’t until my senior year in college that I realized I was going to be really sad without the arts in my life.
“Every day I get to say I’m a working artist is a good day,” says the extremely con- tent Callies. “It’s more than I ever thought. I got a great life and it’s not real complicated. You do something you love. You have good kids. Your spouse is your best friend. You live in a beautiful place.
“It was such a circus and it took us months,” explains Callies of the drawn-out re- cording process. “I’d send the
allies was born in Illi- nois, but relocated to the Hawaiian Islands
“If there’s something more than that out there, I don’t re- ally care.”
“It really was the most ridic- ulous thing!”
“In some ways, I feel like Hawai‘i was like my third par- ent,” says the actor, who grad- uated from Punahou School in 1995. “I mean I got to grow up in a place with malasadas and Spam musubi. That in and of itself is a win.”
“I definitely started acting in junior high and then took it a little bit more seriously when I got to high school, but it didn’t seem practical as a way to make a living,” says Cal- lies, whose first professional starring role came in 2003 as Det. Jane Porter on The WB series Tarzan.
She pauses momentarily to think about her current status before quipping, “I guess I never really grew up.”
Despite the production challenges, Callies is proud that she and her star-studded cast of unpaid actors were able to put out a quality scripted podcast in what she calls “an emerging form of entertain-
CHopefully, it continues to pro- vide that level of escapism and joy for people.”
“So, I made an agreement with myself that I would try to fail at the arts, and then I could be happy settling for something else. But I had to try first; I had to say I swung
with her parents (Valerie Wayne and David Callies, who were English and law profes-
and I missed,
ready to go and be a grown- up.”
SEPTEMBER 1, 2021
HAWAI‘I ISLAND MIDWEEK 5
land in the name of the Hawai- ian nation!”
mic to their house and we’d do a sound check. Then I’d say, ‘OK, you’re going to have to be in some place where the sound isn’t going to bounce around, so go in your closet, but lay all the pillows down and put a comforter over your head.’
ment.” As proof that the team’s efforts have not been in vain, she notes that feedback from Aftershock fans has been “bet- ter than I expected.”
sors, respectively,
at University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa)
when she was 1.
After her parents
split up, Callies —
who first lived in Mānoa, and later in Kāhala — moved into an apartment in Makiki with her mother, who still resides there till this day.
The show’s other executive producers immediately balked at the idea.
“They were like, ‘That’s ri- diculous!’” Callies recalls. “I said ‘Yeah, I know.’ They were like, ‘That would never hap- pen.’ I said, ‘Oh, no-no-no! It’s simultaneously ridiculous and that’s exactly what happened in Hawai‘i!’”
“We were the No. 1 drama podcast of all time on Apple for a bit there. I don’t think we still are, but we were for a couple of weeks and that was cool,” gushes Callies.
consider becoming a professional actor until she was at Dartmouth College).
Sarah Wayne Callies with another former Hawai‘i resident, Janel Parrish (inset), and good friend David Harbour (above).
and now I’ m
Aftershock is available on iHeartRadio and all major podcast platforms.
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I learned the word for “big truck” from my 3 year old granddaughter a very long time ago. As I write this, I am dropping her off at college in New York! Back then, she was a student at `Aha Pu-nana Leo `O Hilo. She often taught “Grandy” the finer points of the Hawaiian language. Because her Dad often drives a “Kalaka Nui”, it’s a word she insisted I know. Long time Big Island residents recall when Kalaka Nui frequented our roads releasing sugar cane
spears from their beds. It wasn’t easy
KALAKA NUI!
Kalaka Nui, we were mostly worried about closure of the Hilo Landfill multiplying the number of trucks going west. Today, the lack of a place to deposit many of our recyclables has made it much worse. We’ve learned to pay the bottle deposit and shop with our own bags but we all need to focus on the bigger issue of how solid waste disposal can have a direct impact on our incomparable quality of life. When quality of life is diminished, property values can be affected. This certainly elevates the problem towards more than a potential traffic inconvenience. I’d love to see any update about a new conventional landfill which when Faith was 3 would have required a liner in Hilo that would have created a soggy rubbish pond. I’m not sure we have made much progress since then. For now, we need to all help in reducing what enters our solid waste stream. We need to find a way back to maximizing use of our sort stations. That alone, helped with the hauling issue. But just when we were getting better at recycling, the source for accepting our “product” vanished. I am encouraged that our reuse centers are flourishing. I’m also surprised how
many residents don’t know they exist. Check them out, they offer a great place to drop off and trade items of value. It’s easy to become complacent. Look how quickly we adjusted to no recycling. Check this out: look how much difference one person can make? This past December, I decided to weigh just the magazines and catalogs I received. The scales tipped at over 50 lbs! Imagine every mailbox received half that much and the scope of the problem becomes crystal clear! Anyone at the landfill on Dec 27th certainly witnessed how overwhelming the volume can be. We live in an extremely fragile eco- system. We don’t recover from abuse very easily. It’s important to do all we can to reduce, reuse and recycle. Let’s start by extending the life or finding an alternative to the Hilo landfill...and if I’m not up-to- date, I invite Environmental Management to give us all an update on what we all can do to make life on Hawai’i Island a better place to live, work and play. Because remember, a good Kalaka Nui is a terrible thing to “waste”!
Blog forward at www.hawaiianrealtyhomes.com
t
t
o pass those big slow moving trucks.
o
Still today we find ourselves following a
different type of big truck along our beautiful highways. These, however, don’t enhance our revenue stream
but instead haul rubbish to the other b
side of the island. I don’t pretend to s
have the solution, but for a long time, I was at least less a part of the problem. Every time I am forced to place paper, a catalog or any of the things I used to recycle in the trash, I cringe. Back when Faith Makanalani was teaching me about
S
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