It started, as so many life-changing things do, with a best friend sending something that was technically an insult.
Eneka Burroughs, a salesperson with Ray White Morris & Co in New Zealand, was in bed on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee when a Facebook notification came through. A friend had tagged her in a casting call.
The post was looking for someone who was 148 centimetres tall and, in the casting team’s direct phrasing, large. Her friend’s commentary on why Eneka was the obvious choice was equally direct.
“She said, ‘This is you. You’re fat,'” Eneka recalls. “Still my best friend. Yeah.”
What followed was a chain of events improbable enough that even Eneka’s husband assumed she was being duped.
“When they asked for photos of me in my undies my husband was sure I was getting scammed,” she says. “But I’d already spoken to a lady from casting on the phone and it seemed legit.”
Two days after the casting call, Eneka was driving to the University of Canterbury. It wasn’t until she was standing in a costume room, being fitted with a nun’s habit, that she thought to ask what exactly she was there for.
“‘You’re going to be the body double for Miriam Margolyes’, they said. I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls. “I love her. She is next level.”
The film was Holy Days, a New Zealand production set in 1974 Christchurch. Miriam stars a Catholic nun – not a role that requires great athleticism, except that at 84, the actress’s mobility had limits. That’s where Eneka came in. Over seven weeks in November and December 2024, she travelled all over the South Island, dressed as a nun, learning to do things she had never done before.
The stunt list was, by any measure, unusual. A stunt coordinator taught her how to fall out of bed face-first without injuring herself. She rehearsed car chase sequences in the back of a vintage Holden with no seatbelts at high speed.
“It was absolutely terrifying,” she says, “but such a cool experience.”
The work nobody sees
Before the stunts, there was the standing around. A lot of it.
Eneka’s primary job on set was one that exists in almost every major film production but that few outside the industry understand. While the crew spend an hour setting up cameras, adjusting lighting rigs and finalising a scene’s composition, it’s not the principal cast who stand in position, that’s what body doubles are for.
Eneka, dressed identically to Miriam, would stand in the frame, say the lines, and hold the position while everything was arranged around her. Then, right at the last moment, she’d exit and Miriam would walk in to shoot the scene.
The days were long and the schedule was unpredictable. Around 10 o’clock each night, cast and crew would receive a run sheet – a call time for the following morning and a location. Many of those locations were remote: Canterbury countryside, the beach at Akaroa, rural spots with no mobile coverage.
“I thought I could still do real estate at the same time,” she says. “There was not a chance. We were rural. There was no Wi-Fi. I never knew when I was coming or going.”
Before signing anything, she called her colleague Tracy, the lead agent she works alongside at Ray White Morris & Co, and gave her the option to say no.
“I said, look, you can say no. I don’t know how much time it’s going to take. If you don’t want to spare me, that’s fine,” Eneka says. “But she said, ‘No. You have to. What a crazy opportunity to do something completely and utterly different.'”
Eighty new friends and one very famous one
There were three body doubles on the production. Early on, the three of them made a pact.
“We decided we were going to get to be friends with every single cast and crew,” Eneka says. “We picked a person every day. You had people that were quite standoffish, people who were over the top. We just broke them down. So we always got to know like 80 new friends, which was amazing.”
The most famous of those friends operated on exactly the same principle, just with considerably more personality.
Miriam is 84 and has been a fixture of British and Australian screen and stage for decades: Harry Potter, Blackadder, and a BAFTA-winning performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. She is, by all accounts, exactly what she appears to be on screen.
“She’s utterly shocking and hilarious.”
One day Miriam asked to see Eneka’s photos on her phone. When she came back from set, she couldn’t find it until someone told her Miriam still had it.
“She was still scrolling through the camera roll, asking about each photo. Who’s this? Why are they important? Why have you got a photo of your daughter but you’ve only got photos of your son in a van? Where’s your husband? Where’s this taken? Where’s that?
“She retains the information as well,” Eneka says. “A few days later she was asking how my daughter was getting on.
“She’s an 84 years old who’s an absolute legend, and she made me realise how important it is to ask the questions and really, really get to know people. Because that’s what real estate is about.”
The sausage incident
The story Eneka tells most often happened over breakfast.
One morning she picked up a plate of food – bacon, pork sausages – and brought it to Miriam forgetting in the moment that she was Jewish. Miriam looked at the plate, then at Eneka.
“She said: ‘I shouldn’t eat those because I’m Jewish, but you shouldn’t eat those because you’re fat,'” Eneka recalls. “Everybody was in stitches, as was I.”
She has thought about why it landed so well, and what she took from it.
“Calling a spade a spade, but phrasing it in a way that doesn’t feel like an attack,” she says. “That’s what I learned from that.”
Eneka returned to real estate with something that is hard to manufacture and impossible to buy: a genuinely extraordinary story.
The Christchurch Press ran a feature and people started recognising her at open homes. One Saturday a buyer walked in, looked at her, and asked if she was the one from the movie.
“I said yes …it was my moonlighting experience,” she says. “I couldn’t have had better profile. And the director and producers have just been so supportive of me putting it out there, because it helps get the word out about the film.”
She has seen Holy Days four times. The first viewing she spent trying to work out which scenes were her. By the second, she could just watch the film.
“It’s a really, really wholesome kiwi movie,” she says. “The whole New Zealand storytelling side of things was just treated so well. Yeah, so proud to be part of it.”
Would she do it again?
“The money’s not as good as real estate,” she says. “But the experience was something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. I’ve got a whole new skill set I didn’t have before … and 80 friends from all around the world.”