Olympus comes to Aotearoa

Hercules, a Hallmark Productions (US) telemovie starring Leelee Sobieski, Sean Astin, and Timothy Dalton, used the NZ countryside as a stand-in for ancient Greece. “The story requires a bigger-than-life place,” says Dalton. “It needs to be … something like an Eden, raw and pure and majestic. And that’s what NZ was.”