Craig Walsh-Wrightson

New Zealand-born Craig Walsh-Wrightson was educated partly in England. A summa cum laude student, he declined a Charterhouse Scholarship to return home, later completing a double Bachelor's degree in History and English Literature from Victoria University of Wellington, while also reading Politics, French and Economics. During post-graduate studies in Modern History, he was recruited by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation as a documentary-maker, then headhunted by a national advertising agency as a writer/TV producer. At age 24 he co-founded January Productions, Australasia's first multi-media creative consultancy and production house, which partnership developed into a top advertising agency, Campaign Advertising Group. Ten years later Craig and his partners sold to UK interests and Campaign became Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand with Craig as Executive Creative Director. Craig has written, produced (and occasionally directed) over 100 major television commercials. As a composer, lyricist and music producer, he has also created dozens of radio and TV commercial music soundtracks. He is a multi-AXIS Award winner (the NZ equivalent of the U.S. advertising industry's 'Clio' awards) as a writer, art director, producer, and film director. As anchorman/interviewer he fronted the prime time TVNZ series 'Money Go Round'. An award-winning international voice-over artist and narrator, Craig's credits include Cadbury's, Coca Cola, Lexus, L'Oreal, Vodafone, Repsol, CBS Records. EMI, Mitsubishi, McDonalds, Suzuki and BNZ. Plus: NZ Book Council's 'Going West' animated cinema commercial (Gold Lion at Cannes), and Television New Zealand's 6 x 90-minutes millenium production 'Our People. Our Century' ('Best Documentary', NZFTA Awards). Obviously, given such busy former lives, Craig came late to screen acting as a career, but quickly established his reputation as a charismatic performer on series such as 'Xena Warrior Princess', 'Outrageous Fortune', 'Burying Brian', 'The Pretender' and Disney's 'Legend of the Seeker'. In what was to be a brief guest role in Starz USA's first 'Spartacus' season, Craig's characterisation so impressed the showrunners - especially in his intense scenes with John Hannah's 'Bataiatus' and Lucy Lawless' 'Lucrezia' - that his character 'Solonius' was written into 8 of the 13 episodes... culminating in a magnificent death-duel with 'Spartacus' himself. And then 'Solonius' returned to life, for all 6 episodes of the top-rating Prequel season 'Spartacus Gods of the Arena' - sold to 150 countries even before its Netflix debut. Subsequent portrayals by Craig include British general Sir Charles Monro in the mini-series 'Deadline Gallipoli', French Minister of Defence Charles Hernu in the Netflix movie 'Bombshell: The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior', and Emperor Tiberius in season two ('Caligula') of the Netflix Original series 'Roman Empire'.