Matthew Sunderland

Matthew Sunderland is a New Zealand actor who also writes and directs, and he trained at Toi Whakaari, finishing in 1997. His leading turn as David Gray in Out of the Blue (2006), a film drawn from the Aramoana Massacre, brought him the Best Actor prize at the 2008 New Zealand Screen Awards. Nature's Way earned him a Best Actor nomination at the national screen awards in 2006 and played in competition at Cannes. He was Uncle Rory in Daniel Borgman's first feature, The Weight of Elephants, and his other features include The Devil's Rock (2011). Tuffy, a short about a father and son at odds in a small New Zealand town, was his first work as writer and director. He joined the Sydney Theatre Company in 2013 for a stage version of Kate Grenville's The Secret River, and his television work includes White Dragon on Shortland Street and Joseph Pritchard, a chemist, in the 2020 miniseries The Luminaries.