![]() ![]() “The acting became my job, and that gave me the opportunity to do all of the other things that I love to do. During that time the movie took off, so I had offers coming in, and it was just laid out for me. Before I knew it, I was travelling all over the world on a tour for the movie, and that was literally for a year or so, just touring. “Then all of a sudden Columbia Pictures started calling me up and telling me all kinds of things, and I had to learn all sorts of stuff. I didn’t know where my life was, I didn’t know what was going on. I was sitting for a couple of months while they were editing the movie, and I had no idea what to do with myself. “Well, after that I ended up coming back from the movie and I was supposed to go away to college, but by the time the movie was over college had already started, so I missed it. “When I went and did the movie, my mom said to me, because I was only 18, ‘It’s a wonderful experience if it’s something you want to do, and if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it ever again’. I didn’t expect that I was going to be the guy actually in the movie! It was the first movie I ever auditioned for, and I went in just for fun so I could have an experience and tell all my friends. I was modelling with Ford Models in New York, and through another modelling agency I ended up auditioning. “It was nothing that I was ever aspiring to be. “Completely by accident,” Atkins tells us about scoring the role in The Blue Lagoon. Which is a perfect segue to discuss Atkins’ rapid rise to fame with The Blue Lagoon, and the fall was equally sudden with The Pirate Movie, before he gained further notoriety with a recurring role on soap opera Dallas. In The Pirate Movie they put me in the back because I couldn’t dance, and I was the star of the movie!” “Hey, hey, hey, that clumsy dancing is my real moves, man,” he hams it up. We suggest that the nervous energy and lack of dancing skills is possibly why he was cast in the first place. It’s kind of naughty, it’s kind of silly and it’s really funny, so, I’m really looking forward to doing it, but at the same time I’m a nervous wreck.” They’re fun people looking for a good time all the time, and that’s why this play is perfect for that. And the audiences in Australia are just magical. The thing about theatre though is that once you’re out there, it’s electric. Man, I’m not a singer and I can barely dance, but I did it. The last play I did was 20-some-odd years ago with Lori Loughlin. I haven’t done a heck of a lot of theatre. ![]() “I’m a little bit nervous about theatre because I like ‘take two’. “They have been after me for a couple years to do this play,” he tells us. Surprisingly, or maybe not, Atkins says that he hasn’t read the play yet, signing on based on the pitch. Like The Full Monty, Ladies Night is about a bunch of unemployed middle aged blokes who decide to form a strip act. Written in 1987, a whole decade before The Full Monty, the New Zealand play is our southern neighbours’ most commercially successful of all time. “Don’t laugh at my flabby ass, all right? Just don’t laugh,” one-time heartthrob Christopher Atkins laughs himself, speaking to us from his home in freezing Connecticut before he boards a plane to Australia for his role in the play, Ladies Night. ![]()
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