JEMAINE
CLEMENT

A Flight of the Conchords song can treat an awkward encounter as if it deserves an entire musical production. Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie built an international audience through that musical-comedy partnership, later bringing it to HBO. In FLM.RED’s reading, the pleasure comes partly from the gap between an elaborate performance and the small, uncomfortable situation that prompted it. Clement can let a character take his own explanation seriously while leaving the audience room to hear its absurdity.

Clement was born in Masterton, New Zealand, on 10 January 1974. He went on to study theatre and film at Victoria University in Wellington, where his circle included McKenzie and Taika Waititi. The Arts Foundation records his theatre collaborations with Waititi during the 1990s and their work as the Humourbeasts, which won the Billy T Award in 1999. Those collaborations place the later screen career within a longer history of making comedy with other performers.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) gave Clement and Waititi room to build a film together as co-writers, co-directors and co-stars. Its mock-documentary approach brings vampires into the practical business of sharing a home. FLM.RED is interested in how that format changes the scale of the joke: supernatural status has to survive chores, disagreements and the need to explain oneself to a camera. The later television series is a separate production; Clement’s executive-producing work on it appears in the Television Academy’s nomination record.

As Tamatoa in Disney’s animated Moana (2016), he moves into voice performance and song. The character offers a different balance of sound and image from the Conchords’ restrained exchanges. A voice can occupy a much larger space when animation supplies the body. For FLM.RED, moving between these works reveals how musical timing can support both an understated joke and a flamboyant display without requiring the same style of performance.

His 2009 Emmy nominations for Flight of the Conchords included lead acting, comedy writing and original music and lyrics, reflecting the different jobs within that project. The films below are those currently linked to Clement in FLM.RED. They offer starting points for further viewing and should not be read as a complete list of his screen, stage or musical work.