Perlina Lau

INFO

Name	Perlina Lau (she/her)
Born	1989
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Hong Kong Chinese
Artform	Screen
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Perlina Lau is a journalist, TV writer, actor and co-host of RNZ’s art show, Culture 101.

Born in Whangārei and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau, Lau’s parents immigrated to Aotearoa in the late ‘70s from Hong Kong. She describes herself as having an active childhood where she studied piano, cello, jazz and ballet.

In 2010, Lau was cast in a production of Michelanne Forster’s children’s play The Secret of Dongting Lake. It was during this production that she met actors JJ Fong and Ally Xue. The three kept in touch and, in 2012, driven by a desire to create more interesting roles and stories for East Asian women — beyond what Fong recalls as the “usual fresh off the boat roles… prostitutes… the good girl Asian girl roles… dragon ladies” — they developed the web series Flat3 (2013). Directed by Roseanne Liang, the situational absurdist comedy follows three flatmates in their twenties as they look for employment and love. “There's a shared aspect of revelling in everyday awkwardness and a certain openness that creates great comedy,” wrote the NZ Herald at the time. “And of course, there are moments of vulnerability and pathos, and sadness.”

As Flat3 Productions, the four went on to create a weekly comedy web series, Friday Night Bites (2016). Described by the group as “a call to action”, they saw their six-month run as a way to say: “We’re not just comedy for Asians. We’re not just comedy for girls. We’re straight up funny, and we have heart.”

During this same period, Lau was balancing a career in the media, starting at TV3 as a script supervisor before taking roles like Social Media Presenter with the Paul Henry Show (2015), Social Media Producer with Story (2016) and Segment Producer with The Project (2017–18).

In 2018, Lau moved to London, where she worked as a journalist with BBC World. That same year, Flat3 Productions began creating the first season of post-apocalyptic sci-fi dark comedy Creamerie, inspired by The Handmaid's Tale and the political turmoil in the United States under Trump. “We sort of looked around and thought: it's quite a grim world. We loved Handmaid's Tale. We're very inspired by it. We thought: what if we could create a show like that but less depressing?”

Lau moved back to Aotearoa in 2020, going into production for Creamerie. “After the first day of shooting, we went into the second lockdown overnight. Everyone that night had to pack up, we had to get everyone out. There was fresh seafood, there were flowers, there was meat, it was full on!” The show made its debut in 2021. Described by the New York Times as “clever but unassuming” and “deflating but comically fertile”, the series won Best Drama at the New Zealand Television Awards in 2021.

Lau graduated with a Bachelor of Communications from AUT in 2011.