A bear of a man with pale blue eyes and a voice like aged whisky, Mitchinson has made a career out of playing dangerous men.
Friends and colleagues describe him as a big softie and “a fabulous human being” who’s a hell of a lot of fun to be around.
But his ability to transform into an absolutely terrifying presence on screen has seen him take on roles other actors haven’t wanted to touch with a barge pole.
In The Monster of Mangatiti, a chilling true-crime dramatisation, he played a depraved sexual predator who held a teenager hostage on his remote farm for five months.
Auckland Theatre Company’s new production of Macbeth will be Mark Mitchinson’s first theatre role since he left drama school in the mid-80s. “People do some terrible things, and I’m moved by this terrible man.” Photo / Jason Dorday
At the time of that awkward dinner-party encounter, he’d just starred in Bloodlines as Colin Bouwer, the South African-born head of psychiatry at Otago University convicted of murdering his wife by slowly poisoning her to death.
Mitchinson, who was born in England but moved here with his family as a young boy, won Best Actor at the 2011 NZ Television Awards for that one.
The following year, he won again for his portrayal of Jan Molenaar in Siege, a drama about the Napier gunman who killed one police officer and seriously injured two others in a 51-hour standoff.
Of all the awful men he’s played – and there have been many – Mitchinson has some empathy for Molenaar, “a complex man who lost his shit”.
He has none for Bouwer, who once told US philosopher and New Yorker writer Carl Elliott that the public would never understand the pain that psychopaths endure.
Now, Mitchinson is facing what might just be one of his greatest challenges: to inspire compassion for a man who kills his boss, orders a hit on his best friend, has his rival’s young children slaughtered, and is at least partly to blame for his wife’s suicide.
Whether Macbeth is a tragic hero or a villain has been much debated by Shakespearean scholars. To what extent do the witches’ prophecies ultimately determine his fate?
Mitchinson leans toward the view that people have to take personal accountability for their actions. “But in some ways, he’s poisoned by this dream that he can be great again,” he says.
“That’s the thing with tragedy, you kind of relate to it, right? People do some terrible things, and I’m moved by this terrible man.”
Mark Mitchinson says Macbeth is “one of the greatest roles Shakespeare ever wrote for a man. And Lady Macbeth is one of the greatest roles he ever wrote for a woman.” Photo / Jason Dorday
Anyone who saw director Benjamin Kilby-Henson’s take on Romeo & Juliet last year will know they’re in for another wild ride when Auckland Theatre Company’s production of Macbeth opens this month.
He’s set Shakespeare’s “OG thriller” in a giant subterranean sewer system, which has become a refuge from an unspecified catastrophe that’s devastated the world above ground.
Macbeth is an ageing, battle-weary soldier suffering from PTSD.
“Perhaps the witches are not the first vision he’s ever seen,” Kilby-Henson says.
For Lady Macbeth, played by Sara Wiseman, he’s drawn on studies showing women married to soldiers have a history of self-harm.
“It’s something they can control when everything else around them is open to chance,” he says. “So with Sass, we’re exploring Lady Macbeth being quite dishevelled and then having to put on this mask.”
In its own way, Macbeth, too, is the story of star-crossed lovers. Legendary art critic Harold Bloom once said it was the most successful marriage Shakespeare had ever written.
“We need to feel and invest in their love, even though it ends with them asunder,” says Kilby-Henson, “and see how broken they are right from the start.”
Mitchinson and his Macbeth co-star Sara Wiseman first talked to director Benjamin Kilby-Henson seven years ago about joining forces as Shakespeare’s power couple.
The chemistry between Mitchinson and Wiseman should be electric.
The pair met in 2017 while filming the psychological thriller, Human Traces, and have been close friends ever since. In fact, they first pitched the concept of a Macbeth collaboration to Kilby-Henson seven years ago.
One of New Zealand’s most experienced actors, Wiseman made her name in the TV show Mercy Peak, which ran for three seasons, and had a lead role in ATC’s 2024 season of Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect.
For Mitchinson, this will be his first professional theatre gig since he graduated from drama school in the mid-80s – and there was a 20-year hiatus when he didn’t do any acting at all.
He’s since made up for lost time with a string of film and TV credits, including voicing multiple Power Rangers and playing a washed-up, leather-clad rock star in the award-winning comedy web series, High Road, shot on location near his home in Piha.
So far this year, he’s played an alcoholic in local show Crackhead, a black comedy set in a rehab clinic, and an archaeology professor in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – a part the horror film director wrote specifically for him.
Macbeth director Benjamin Kilby-Henson says Mitchinson has the stage presence that’s vital in Shakespeare. Photo / Jason Dorday
For whatever reason, theatre jobs have never come his way. Now about to turn 60, Mitchinson feels Macbeth is a role he’s aged into.
“He’s battle-worn, he’s weary, and it feels like I’m the right age for that.
“The bigness of the life you’ve had after 60 years means you can go to that place and totally understand it, more in some ways than I did even when we first went to Ben.
“At the end of act five, he says, ‘I’ve lived long enough … my way of life has fallen into the sea’. I’ve seen so many productions where they play it as a battle, but I think there have been too many battles for Macbeth.
“He’s broken, you know? It should be a kind of lament.”
Strangely enough, the idea of pre-ordained destiny explored in Macbeth has some uncanny parallels with Mitchinson’s own life.
His father, who was an Anglican minister, brought the family out to Rotorua in the early 70s. They later moved to Auckland, where both his parents were actively involved in protests against the 1981 Springbok Tour. His big brother, John, a British writer and podcaster, went on to help create the BBC show QI.
After spending his high-school years at Selwyn College, Mitchinson returned to the United Kingdom and trained at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.
“I wanted nothing more than to be an actor,” he says. “I wanted it so much.”
So Mitchinson’s world was rocked when he was told by his teachers – including legendary voice expert Patsy Rodenburg – that “it wouldn’t happen for him” until later in life.
His confidence had already been shaken when he asked a director, who’d come to see one of his student performances, what he thought of the play.
“He said it was rubbish, and I was completely, utterly devastated. It hardened me, but it also broke me. I walked away from acting and didn’t look back.”
Mitchinson as Napier gunman Jan Molenaar in Siege, 2011.
Still in his early 20s, he moved to the United States and did a series of interviews for a book on American actors who were also politically active, including Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen and Ed Asner. It’s never been published.
In Miami Beach, he worked in a vegan restaurant for a while before returning to London and opening The Mars Bar in Covent Garden with a “crazy Dutch guy”, just as flavoured vodka was becoming all the rage.
Their signature trick was melting a Mars bar into a bottle of vodka on top of the cappuccino machine.
The bar took off when one of Mitchinson’s drama school mates, Clive Rowe, was singing in Carousel at a theatre on the West End and brought the whole cast for drinks after the show.
Blur were regulars, too, recording their latest album just down the road. Oasis threw a party at the bar to celebrate their first No 1 hit.
“All of a sudden, we’re the hottest place in town.”
His next move was a collab with the Poetry Society, inspired by the slam poetry scene he’d seen emerging in New York.
Called the Poetry Cafe, it combined a vegetarian restaurant with an underground performance space frequented by the likes of poet Ted Hughes.
That’s where he met British actor Greg Wise and his girlfriend (now wife) Emma Thompson. In the web series High Road, Thompson pops up in a cameo role as the unravelling Terry Huffer’s long-suffering sister.
“She’s just like that,” Mitchinson says, with a laugh. “Always telling me off.”
Oscar winner Emma Thompson and husband Greg Wise with Mitchinson during filming for the web series High Road.
Then one day, an oil trader walked into the Poetry Cafe and offered to bankroll a franchise network across the whole country.
“I thought if I do that, that’s me for the rest of my life. So, I went, ‘nah, I’m done’.”
Another drama school friend – a stage manager this time – had learnt how to programme HTML and was building a website for the band Jamiroquai.
They hooked up with a third partner to start a new business, Motion Pixels, creating websites for bands like Simple Minds and rolling out the UK Government’s millennium bug campaign.
Then the dotcom bubble burst. Mitchinson sold his house in England and moved back to New Zealand in 2002, buying a bach in Piha.
At a party in Auckland, he met producer Tina McLaren – now group commissioning editor for Sky NZ. Less than a year later, he’d become a stay-at-home dad to the first of their two children.
Mitchinson with Freya and Buzz at the multi-level “treehouse bach” he bought in Piha before returning from London in 2002. Photo / Jason Dorday
It was his daughter’s godfather, Auckland actor Peter Feeney, who convinced him to audition for a kids’ TV series called The Amazing Extraordinary Friends. The role, a Ray Winstone-style character, was his first part in more than 20 years.
“That was an absolute joy,” he says of the show, which ran for three seasons.
“The character was an absolute cracker and we just had a ball. It gave me lots of confidence. Then I got Bloodlines and that changed everything.”
The couple still live in that same Piha bach, flanked by bush and an uninterrupted view of the sea. Justin Harwood, the former Chills bassist who wrote and directed High Road, is one of their neighbours.
He and Mitchinson ran Radio Piha for a few years from a caravan at the beach, just like Terry Huffer does (well, not exactly like Huffer does).
Picked up by Lightbox, the show was adapted into an eight-part TV series, although early talk of a feature film fizzled out.
Mark Mitchinson as Bill Cornelius in The Monster of Mangatiti, 2015.
Mitchinson likes playing against type in comedy roles, but he’s not haunted by the dark, complex characters he’s often portrayed.
“My method is to go in and be very intense, work hard, and then just close the door on those people and walk away.”
Looking back, he’s come to accept his drama teachers were right. By the time he made Bloodlines, he was already in his 40s.
What kind of actor might he have become without that early setback?
“I’d be crap,” he says.
“To have wanted it so much and had that taken away, then to come back to it with a little less need … I genuinely don’t care what [the critics] think. That just seems a waste of time to me.
“You’ve got to just do the work that you can. That’s why I choose the parts other actors don’t want and that people won’t like, because that’s the job, too.”
Macbeth is on at Auckland’s ASB Waterfront Theatre from July 28 to August 22, see atc.co.nz
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with an interest in social issues and the arts.