Chelsie preston crayford biography of donald

Chelsie Preston Crayford

Chelsie Florence Preston Crayford (born ) is a New Zealand actress. She portrayed Josephine in the film What We Do in the Shadows.

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Actress[]

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• Preston Crayford was mistakenly credited as "Chelsie Preston-Crayford".

The star of A Remarkable Place to Die reflects on her life in television.

It’s been a big year for Chelsie Preston Crayford, whose previous screen credits include Nude Tuesday, Eagle vs Shark and Underbelly: Razor. In Dark City: The Cleaner, she paced the suburban streets of Christchurch as the maniacal Melissa, a woman who quite literally busted the balls of Cohen Holloway’s Joe Middleton. Then she was off to Queenstown for four months to play Anais Mallory in murder mystery mini-series A Remarkable Place to Die, all while writing the final funding applications for her first feature film, Caterpillar. 

No wonder she found herself in the middle of the woods at night somewhere in Central Otago, realising she should have done some research into how to hold a gun properly. “The problem with being a detective is you have to look really cool,” she laughs. “And I’m quite an uncoordinated person and I suddenly felt very stupid.” Maintaining Mallory’s “straight-laced” persona also posed a challenge in a helicopter scene, where Preston Crayford struggled to “look grumpy”, while also taking in these staggering views of Queenstown. 

While has brought with it two giant crime-adjacent roles in Melissa and Detective Mallory, Preston Crayford admits she can’t watch anything remotely dark herself, and couldn’t handle Dark City if she hadn’t been in it. “I’m too scared. I’m such a wuss,” she says. “I do like the concept of a murder mystery, but if I have to be by myself at night time, I can’t watch anything that’s remotely scary.” Thankfully, she was brave enough to look back at her life in TV, including a shocking reality moment, seeing a sitcom legend in the flesh, and her journey to hand-acting. 

My earliest television memory is… When I was maybe three or four years old, I was very obsessed with this VHS that was a first aid video of different dramatisations of emergency scenarios. I re

By the time she'd graduated from drama school Toi Whakaari, Chelsie Florence had won an award for acclaimed short Fog and acted in three features, including a starring role in Home by Christmas as her own grandmother. She has gone on to play a cult member (TV series The Cult) and Katherine Mansfield's lover (telemovie Bliss). She also won awards in Australia for TV thriller The Code and a starring role as a crimelord in the s edition of Underbelly. In she acted in Kiwi movie drama The Inland Road. Formerly known as Chelsie Preston Crayford, she is the daughter of director Gaylene Preston and musician Jonathan Crayford.

My mum was the director, so it was amazing to be able to work so closely together on a story we both knew so intimately. It was a once in a lifetime experience. Chelsie Preston Crayford on playing her own grandmother in movie Home by Christmas

It's a daunting time to make a movie, but Chelsie Preston Crayford is "thrilled beyond words" to get funding for her semi-autobiographical feature Caterpillar.

The New Zealand actor chats to Charlotte Ryan about acting, music and telling a story "set in the world" of her own teenage life in earlys Wellington.

In Caterpillar, a year-old girl is living with her mother - a "trailblazing feminist filmmaker" in her 50s - and her beloved elderly grandmother who is starting to show signs of dementia.

Preston Crayford says her real-life grandmother Tui was "the domestic glue" of their intergenerational household and there every day when she'd get home from school.

"Her brain started to change and as a result the fabric of our family started to change kind of underneath our feet.

"[Caterpillar] is about these three women at these three very pivotal life stages, navigating this huge change transformation and learning how to better see each other in the process."

Preston Crayford doesn't try to side-step the fact that her mum is the acclaimed filmmaker Gaylene Preston, and says the connection "definitely helps" her career.

"It does help for people to know who you are, it helps to open doors. I think then you have to deliver, you know."

She and Gaylene, who she has deep respect for creatively, speak all the time about Caterpillar, which took around five years to write.

"She said to me after one draft, 'Maxine's my hero.' That's the character based on her, so that's great."

Caterpillar is a tribute to Preston Crayford's mum and grandmother - "both of the women that raised me" - and also a personal reckoning with motherhood and her own creativity.

As a young actor desperately seeking approval, Preston Crayford says she was forced to learn how to back hers