Do we like Kevin Smith?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful found and warm tributes from his peers, but the sourced record is short, so it stops short of the top end.
This is the Kevin Smith who played Ares, the God of War, not the American filmmaker. He was a New Zealand actor best known to Xena fans as the charming, scheming war god who kept needling Xena and Hercules. Screen Daily called him best known for Ares in Xena: Warrior Princess.
Before the toga and the swagger, he built a solid career at home. Screen Daily lists New Zealand features including Desperate Remedies, Channelling Baby and Jubilee among his credits. He was, by the trade press's account, one of the country's leading actors of the time.
Harm check: we went looking and found nothing. No remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, no campaigns, and no company he kept that raised an eyebrow. To be fair, he died in 2002, well before the era of podcasts and endless social media, so the record is short. Absence of evidence isn't a glowing reference, but it's a clean sheet.
His death is the sad part of the story. Reports in February 2002 said he died in a Beijing hospital after a fall, aged 38, just after finishing work on the film Warriors of Virtue II. Accounts of exactly what happened differ, so we'll leave it at that.
He was due to appear opposite Bruce Willis in Man of War, a role many in the industry reportedly thought could have launched his Hollywood career. New Zealand's Associate Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Judith Tizard called him a wonderful New Zealand actor and praised his intelligence and modest sense of humour. That's a lovely thing to have said about you.
So, would we support him? Yes. Nothing sourced against him, a beloved turn as one of TV's best villains, and tributes that talk about talent and humility. We'd just love there to be more to read, because he had more to give.