Tim Balme has an unusual vice.
"I swear it's good. I've got oodles of it," he enthuses.
"Because I don't smoke and I don't particularly drink, so I needed to find some substance that keeps me ... calm."
The actor, writer and bigwig at South Pacific Pictures, the same guy who straddled a motorbike in his leather jacket in Shortland Street and who said out loud the lines he'd written for himself as the dodgy Quentin Bates on Outrageous Fortune, gets high on choral music.
We're at his Pt Chevalier home and harmonised voices singing angelic hymns by Italian composer de Morales fill the room.
It is the kind of thing you'd expect to hear at a Norse god's house, which makes sense as Balme has returned to the screen after a four-year hiatus to play such a deity on TV3's The Almighty Johnsons.
He discovered the music last year during a stressful time at work.
A friend had it on and he became hooked.
Still, it seems a bit of an oxymoron.
Balme is naturally calm, padding around the living room in bare feet as a storm rages outside.
"I don't subscribe to stressing out. It doesn't tend to help."
Two of his three children, Edie (9) and Nikau (5) were meant to fly south to stay with their grandparents but the weather meant their flights were cancelled (23-year-old Sam is on his OE).
So Balme is playing dad and boss, and dealing with a constantly ringing cellphone.
Someone needs him in the studio urgently (he's a sought-after voiceover artist and narrator).
Twice, it's his wife, director Katie Wolfe, calling.
"I had my day all planned," he tells her, sounding not in the least rattled, "then everything changed."
You could say the same about his career.
Much of it took even Balme by surprise, from his early days at acting school to where he is now, involved in almost every facet of the TV business.
As Head of Development at SPP, the production company behind (among other shows) Outrageous Fortune, Go Girls and Shortland Street, he's in a powerful position, in charge with keeping ideas bustling through from conception to screen.
This on top of making The Almighty Johnsons, his almightiest undertaking yet.
It's the first time he's had a lead role both behind and in front of the camera.
Balme plays Mike, the eldest of four "ordinary" Kiwi brothers who just happen to be descended from Norse gods.
With a messy past involving the abuse of his powers, it's up to him to keep his younger brothers in check.
The show comes from the reliable Outrageous Fortune creative team of Rachel Lang and James Griffin.
Balme had worked as a writer on Outrageous Fortune so it was a "no-brainer", says Lang, that he'd also work as a storyliner and scriptwriter on this too.
The key similarity between The Almighty Johnsons and Outrageous Fortune, he says, is that the story revolves around family.
"There's no point trying to make something the same or even similar [to Outrageous]. That way lies madness."
What wasn't such a no-brainer was casting Balme in the show.
Having helped to write the characters, he'd come to know Mike better than anyone.
After a fruitless search to find an actor capable of inhabiting the guy he'd nicknamed "Cheer-up-Mike", Balme took on the role.
"For me to go back to acting, I wasn't going to take on something I didn't really want to do. I wasn't going to do it for the hell of it. But I really liked the story."
Balme's rise to power started out in an ungodly fashion, with the lead part as a zombie-killer in Peter Jackson's splatstick horror, Braindead.
Not your typical leading man-role, it nonetheless catapulted him from drama graduate to international cult star, particularly in Germany where the fans were almost as fervent as the zombies.
"He was a brilliant young actor," says SPP producer Simon Bennett, who has known Balme since they went to drama school together in the mid-'80s.
He remembers Balme as a confident young student, equally at home as frontman of the band Toys in the Attic as he was on stage.
"He was always head and shoulders above everyone else as a performer. Everyone knew he'd go a long way."
This, despite some of his peers thinking the Tauranga teenager was "delusional" for choosing acting.
New Zealand in the 1980s had little in the way of a television industry.
Until Shortland Street.
In 1994, Balme landed a part as the lanky-haired, kinda sleazy Greg Feeney, often seen straddling a motorbike.
The five-year gig gave him experience and confidence and helped to validate the work he and his peers were doing.
He progressed from dodgy guy to cop, as Ken Wilder in Mercy Peak, winning Best Supporting Actor for the role at the TV Awards in 2002.
Then he returned to the dark side, playing a convicted murderer in Stuart McKenzie's 2003 movie For Good.
But Balme has never been content just to rest on acting.
In the mid-'90s he decided to take control of his career by creating roles for himself and setting up a production company with Wolfe.
They successfully toured the theatre production Blue Sky Boys, in which he and Michael Galvin (Shortland Street) played the Everly Brothers, a chance to show off his musical talent.
He also wrote and starred in the one-man show The Ballad of Jimmy Costello, which toured the country and was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival.
"I don't think I'm a control freak," he says, adding that he would've had to direct it as well to fit that bill.
"I just had a desire to tell the story and generate some work."
Balme looked to writing.
"I used to find it quite frustrating that large parts of your day as an actor is sitting around on your bottom, waiting ... I felt like my life's kind of ticking away here."
Writing, on the other hand, felt proactive and exciting.
He'd already dabbled a bit, after Lang and Griffin decided he had the right "Westie sensibility" and employed him as a storyliner on the second season of Outrageous Fortune.
"I was just an apprentice and it was fantastic. What a great opportunity, what a gift," says Balme.
"I went in with eyes and ears wide open and drank it up."
In February last year, Balme took on his first office job after Chris Grist stepped down as SPP's head of development.
"I had to learn about things like holiday pay, and taking leave and things like that. I'd never had personal experience of it. What I love most is they pay the ACC bill. That's a huge deal."
The job means he's in the curious position of being on several sides of the creative process, simultaneously keeping an eye out for potential new series, while working on new shows.
All of which means there's the potential for a conflict of interest, where projects Balme is directly involved with might end up competing to get the go-ahead.
It also means the dynamic with his former mentors Lang and Griffin has changed.
He is now their boss.
Those who know him say Balme is diplomatic and level-headed.
And with so much experience in the industry, it's not such a surprise he should end up in the role.
"He's modest, believe it or not.
If there's an ego there, it never rears its ugly head," says Bennett.
The Almighty Johnsons screens Mondays at 9.30pm on TV3.
