The Rookie’s Melissa O’Neil on fame, fandom and being ‘obsessed’ with Aotearoa

Sunday, 3 May 2026

In an age of streaming, ‘prestige TV’, and years-long waits between seasons, there is something comforting about good old fashioned network telly.

The Rookie, which airs here on TVNZ, is a prime example. An American police procedural, it has routinely pumped out as many as 22 episodes every single year since 2018.

Melissa O’Neil is one of the show’s main stars and was in the country last week for the Armageddon Expo fan convention.

It’s slightly unusual to have a police procedural star alongside actors from fantasy shows like Stranger Things, O’Neil admits, but The Rookie is no ordinary show.

Last year, it was the top programme on TVNZ+ - no mean feat given it was up against the 6pm news and Bluey. In the past three years, episodes of The Rookie on TVNZ+ have been streamed over 38.5 million times.

“It's very rewarding for us as actors to kind of break through that fourth wall and get an opportunity to meet everybody and hear direct feedback from them,” O’Neil, speaking to the Sunday Star-Times at TVNZ’s HQ in Auckland, says of appearing at fan conventions.

A former Canadian Idol winner in her teens, O’Neil has built a global fanbase through her dramatic turn as Lucy Chen, one of the emotional anchors and core characters of The Rookie since day one.

In an age where celebrities are often starting to be more selective about what they share on social media, O’Neil knows she has a responsibility when it comes to how she interacts with her followers online.

“If I'm just true to myself and authentic then it'll be OK, and that includes having boundaries about what I don't want to share. I think it goes both ways, that whole parasocial thing,” says O’Neil, who boasts 1.8m followers on Instagram.

“Social media contributes to a false sense of intimacy. And I would say that my socials … do cater to a feeling of intimacy, because there are intimate things that I share through my social media, but I tend to lean towards topics that I think are universal and perhaps not things that people look at very often.”

Part of the reason The Rookie has picked up such a devoted audience is down to the close knit bond between the core actors, both on and off-screen.

Growing up in the limelight, O’Neil seems to relish the chance to work with an ensemble of actors. Perhaps surprisingly, she says she manages to maintain anonymity most of the time - New Zealand is probably the place where she has been spotted in public the most.

“I don't get recognised very often. But then again, I also don't go out very often. I'm a bit of a homebody,” she says, confessing to a love of trashy reality TV like Temptation Island - “it's just like eating junk food”.

Singing, which first pushed her into the limelight, is a “gift” - but the experience of being in the public spotlight as a teenager was a “little traumatic”.

“When you do something in a very public way when you're a teenager - just imagine what you were doing when you were 16 and 17 - and then, like, put it on a national stage,” she says.

“But I would love to move back into that space. It's a place where I feel very much at home, and I think maybe sometimes that makes me feel protective of it, because I get nervous about exposing myself to public scrutiny.”

The Rookie hasn’t ignored O’Neil’s singing prowess (there was an American Idol crossover, in a very meta acknowledgement of her previous life), but it hasn’t gone full Buffy yet and committed to a musical episode.

O’Neil’s unlikely to push for that either. She admits to being less “outspoken” as an actress than in the earlier stages of her career, happier now to let the writers and directors dictate how her character evolves.

That’s despite spending nearly a decade in the shoes of Lucy Chen, someone she knows inside and out.

“Over time I think that what is more graceful is to make it work. Make sense [of] what's on the page [and] find the truth in it. That is more interesting as an actor, instead of trying to do something that's not your job, which is make the writing conform to what your idea is.”

The pace of The Rookie also means there’s probably not a lot of downtime to worry about things like this anyway. O’Neil says that the show’s American network, ABC, has even made a concerted effort to have less time between seasons of The Rookie - good news for fans waiting for the already announced ninth outing.

“I think that sometimes people can lose steam on a show when there is a really big gap,” says O’Neil, who recently watched (and adored) Apple TV’s Pluribus, unlikely to return for season two until at least 2028.

“It's a wild pace [on The Rookie]. I have to admit, there are times where we are just in the middle of shooting day after day after day, and we don't even know where the time has gone … but we have a lot of fun.”

In the meantime, before braving the crowds at Armageddon, O’Neil has been taking in the sights of New Zealand - a country she claims to have been “obsessed with” for a while.

There was even time for a little bit of cross-promotion, with O’Neil pictured alongside New Zealand’s police commissioner Richard Chambers ahead of the two filming a segment for a local webseries.

O’Neil understands that while law enforcement may make for good television, there’s a responsibility when it comes to discussing the real world work of the police.

She believes The Rookie has always been aware of that.

“I do think that our show has always taken heart to be responsible about how we portray things and to also be aspirational in the way that we portray policing,” she says.

While tight scheduling prevented her from reaching the South Island, O’Neil did manage to visit Rotorua in an effort to immerse herself in some local culture.

“It really caused me to be quite emotional to see the healthy integration of the First Nation peoples of this land and how they are honoured properly,” says O’Neil.

“On the flip side of it made me kind of sad that we don't have anything like that in North America, that we haven't evolved to that level of understanding that everything is more beautiful … with each other in these ways.

“And I know I'm a visitor and that I probably don't see the whole picture, I'm sure, but what little I saw was absolutely magnificent.”

So magnificent, she already wants to come back.