He is more interesting than he professes to be, although partly that is because he is so normal, for an actor.
He suggested we have lunch and we both had, at his suggestion, enormous steaks and huge bowls of chips. I asked what he likes to do when he's not working and he said, sweeping his arm over the table: "This!" He had only one glass of wine because he was going on to rehearsals for The Almighty Johnsons, but you can imagine him having more than one. So he likes eating and drinking, in a blokey, rare-steak way.
We didn't talk about acting at all. I don't think he knows how to, or, more likely, he has no interest in talking about the art of acting. I asked him who his favourite actors were and he said he really likes Hugh Jackman.
He also likes Tom Cruise because of films like Top Gun which made him want to become an actor.
He likes Jackman as an actor but really he likes him because "he's also a businessman. And he sings and dances and he's good at selling himself. He's everything I'd aspire to be".
Cortese is also a businessman, having last year bought the New Zealand franchise for ICMI, an inspirational speakers' company. He has an office in Takapuna and when he goes to the office he puts on a suit.
"To me, acting is a business. Every part of being an actor should be the same as being a lawyer, or whatever.
You still have to sell yourself and you have to be healthy, you've got to be prepared, you've got to deliver what people want. You've got to get up at the right time in the morning and you've got to market yourself and you've got to do your GST." I said, "Are you interested in art at all?" He said, absolutely deadpan, that he had some really good oil paintings, by an artist from Palmerston North.
I said, "Are you a serious actor now?"
He said: "A serious actor! Ha! I'm a television actor. I'm pretty commercial. I'm not a method actor, I'm not an Indie actor. I think commercial television is where I fit best. It pays my bills." It's hard to figure out where he fits in the acting world. But he actively pursued a stage career and fame, and in 1993 went off to London and the West End to do musical theatre. He was a travel agent at the time.
He'd done amateur theatre in Palmerston North so presumably somebody had told him he was good enough to be a professional. "I wasn't. I was told I was terrible. Even my mum told me to stop singing."
He says he now doesn't know how he had the nerve, but he did go and did get roles. He stayed for 10 years and then got an offer of a role in Shortland Street: the evil Dominic. He says he was awful. All of which only demonstrates that he's determined, and stubborn, certainly not that he was meant to be an actor.
Anyway, the point is that his profile was created through a dancing show and salacious gossip.
I knew that he has a daughter, Tammy, the result of a one-night stand in 1992, whom he knew nothing about until she wrote to him just before she turned 16. She sent photographs and Nerida said she looked just like him, but he had a DNA test done before meeting her.
I also know that Jett is, possibly, named after one of John Travolta's children. He said I shouldn't believe everything I read. But I know these things because he and Nerida sell their stories to the women's mags, even the story of his "love child". He says he got wind that somebody was going to do a story, so he got in first, and that anyway, his daughter got the money.
He sold their wedding and the deal went sour and still they go on selling stories. He told me that after Jett was born, a reporter turned up at the door and a photographer with a long lens sat at the end of his drive for two days, so he might as well make some money out of the story by selling it.
"And both of my children have lovely educational trusts now," he said.
He barely mentioned he is shooting the second series of The Almighty Johnsons, which will screen at a yet-to-be-announced date in 2012, so there, I've done it for him. I should send him the bill.
He has said he has real lows, when he doesn't get a part, say, but he was horrified when I asked if he meant he got depressed. He said, "I wouldn't go down the depression road at all!" He has very manly lows. "I go into man-cave mode and I shut down."
He's 43, but there is something boyish about him, for all his business mindedness.
There is an idea about him, I think, driven by his marketing and all of those appearances in gossip pages and magazines, that he is desperate for fame. He used to be, he says, but he's not that interesting any more.
He can be very funny. He had a funny idea, which he claims he read somewhere, that I only interview people I don't like. Neither of us should believe everything we read.
