Like most great Australian actors, Remy Hii got his big break on Neighbours. Hii did two years on Ramsay Street before going on to appear in the juggernaut flicks Crazy Rich Asians and Spider-Man: Far From Home, as well as the Netflix series Wellmania.
His latest role is a rabbit named Bunniguru. Hii is one of the voice actors in the Australian animated feature Scarygirl (in cinemas 26 October), sharing the cast list with the likes of Sam Neill, Dylan Alcott, Tim Minchin and Anna Torv.
The Malaysian-born, Townsville-raised actor loves his job – but his truest passion is getting behind the lens. Here Hii tells us about the collection of cameras he can’t do without, and the story of two other important personal belongings.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
My cameras. I have a seriously problematic collection of film cameras – currently over 20 – that began when my mum passed down the Minolta SLR that she grew up with. I was 19 years old and it sparked a passion that has lasted my entire adult life.
I love my job as an actor. But I just feel like photography gives me an outlet for creativity that isn’t always there when you’re on a set that’s two hours late for lunch and everyone just wants to go home. I’ve documented all the jobs I’ve ever worked on. I’ve taken lots of photos of friends. And photography was a saving grace during lockdown.
My pride and joy is a Hasselblad 500C/M that I bought years ago, before I travelled to Iceland and came back with some of the most breathtaking pictures I have ever taken. It’s the camera that one of my photographic idols, Helmut Newton, used. It’s the camera they gave to the Apollo astronauts on the moon landings. I feel like I’ve been through a lot with that camera.
My most useful object
An eight-inch chef’s knife. I love to cook for people. And I think eight inches is ideal for a chef’s knife – anything longer gets too unwieldy, anything less and you move into a different category of knives.
A well-sharpened chef’s knife is such an underrated tool. You don’t need 12 different kinds of knives to cut six different kinds of meat. You also don’t need to spend a lot of money. I have a pricey knife that I tried for a while and I have a specialty crafted Japanese knife. But it’s the £30 knife I bought from Tesco when I was living in the UK that I’ve ended up using the most.
The item I most regret losing
I once worked with an actor called Baljinnyamyn Amarsaikhan, or Amra for short. He’s Mongolia’s most famous actor – like the Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise of central Asia. We met filming an early Netflix original series on location in Kazakhstan. I played Jingim Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. And he played my uncle, Ariq Böke, a contentious figure in Mongolian history.
Through that time I fell in love with Mongolian culture. I spent hours listening to podcasts and reading books, trying to honour the legacy of my character and honour a story that I think is often misrepresented in revisionist history.
As a wrap gift, Amra gave me this ancient Mongolian whistling arrowhead – an artefact hundreds of years old, recovered somewhere from the Mongolian steppe. I wore it for years on a chain, close to my heart.
Until years later, when shooting a somewhat less epic story in the city of Brisbane, the chain broke. We were filming in a field and I frantically spent the better part of the afternoon combing through the grass. But alas, that priceless symbol of the once-great Mongolian empire now lives somewhere in a field in Nundah.
Scarygirl opens in cinemas nationally on 26 October
