Wonderful role for Kiwi

TEA PARTY: Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, which is due to open in March.

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It's a case of curiouser and curiouser in the career of Kiwi actor Marton Csokas.

His Hollywood kickoff was playing the role of Celeborn, husband of elf queen Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), in The Lord of the Rings and now he has a part in Johnny Depp's movie Alice in Wonderland.

The film, directed by Tim Burton, has a star-studded cast including Depp as The Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter playing the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway the White Queen, Christopher Lee the Jabberwock and Stephen Fry the Cheshire Cat.

Last week, backer Walt Disney issued the first photographs from the film due out in March next year showing Depp, Bonham Carter, Hathaway, and a relative newcomer Australian Mia Wasikowska, who plays Alice.

Csokas, who first came to notice when he played bumbling doctor Leonard Dodds in Shortland Street during the 90s, plays 19th-century writer Charles Kingsley in the film.

Kingsley, best known for The Water Babies, was a contemporary of Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland in 1865.