Do we like them?

Do we like Temuera Morrison?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record and nothing harmful found, but the reading was thin and there is one old run-in with the law.

Temuera Morrison grew up in Rotorua, with school holidays on his grandparents' farm in the King Country. He has said of those years “I never wanted to leave.” He was mentored in performing by his uncle, the entertainer Howard Morrison, and later got his Hollywood break partly thanks to a director who lent him recording gear for audition tapes.

His one real stain is old. In 2000 he admitted hitting a teenager on Auckland's North Shore after youths set fire to a real estate sign outside his house. The Herald reported he got the wrong kid. He went through the diversion scheme for first offenders, so no conviction was entered, and paid medical costs plus a donation to a kindergarten. The family felt that was too light.

His own account was that he was defending his property and was sorry it happened. That is a self-defence story the other side didn't buy, so call it a contested episode rather than a clean one. It was a single incident reported 26 years ago, and nothing like it turned up since in the sources we could open.

On the harm test, the searches found nothing. No anti-LGBTQ+ or anti-trans comments, no vaccine or climate conspiracy talk, no links to the culture-war studios we checked. That is a gap as well as a clean sheet: many of the pages we tried to read were blocked, so this is what we found, not a guarantee.

The good stuff here is small but human. During the 2020 Covid lockdown, when he was stuck in New Zealand, he took a concrete-pouring job with a local business in Cambridge. Locals shared the photo and praised him for pitching in. It is a nice snapshot, not a charity résumé, and we couldn't verify a formal cause he backs.

Nothing new has turned up on him lately that we could verify from a reliable page. The recent stories were gossip-site rumours that even those sites flagged as hoaxes. Bottom line: a likeable, grounded bloke with one old fight on file and no sign of harm. We'd happily support him.