A German director came close to derailing Rebecca Gibney’s stellar acting career before it even started.

As a teenager in Wellington, New Zealand, she was invited to her first-ever audition. Unfortunately for her, she got the part.

“I hated it, hated every moment of the experience because he got me doing things I didn’t want to do. That I didn’t understand,” Gibney tells The New Daily.

“If he wanted to make me cry, he’d roll the cameras and slap my face to make me cry.

“I thought if this is acting, you can shove it,” she recalls.

Rebecca had dropped out of school at 15 after a “dysfunctional” childhood, fraught with violence from her alcoholic father.

Despite having been an A+ student, she took unskilled work, including packing fruit in her mother’s wholesale fruit and vegetable business.

In desperation, her mother paid for her to undertake courses, including modelling.

“She was trying to encourage me, giving me voice lessons, trampoline lessons. She was trying to get me to do more,” Gibney says.

The modelling course put her into orbit of the German film director who wanted to cast real people, not actors.

Fortunately for future audiences, she was later invited to audition for a role in a TVNZ children’s series, which she got and loved.

At 19, on holiday in Australia, someone suggested she tried to get work here.

“I thought – why not – mainly because I didn’t believe I would get anything, so I wasn’t nervous. So I’d walk in to an agency and say: ‘Hi, want to represent me?’ ”

“I remember my first agent saying, ‘You can’t just walk in like that. Where’s your resume?’ I said, ‘I don’t have one. I’ve done this, I’ve done that and here’s my photo’. I was just so ballsy because I didn’t believe they would take me on.”

She went on to play some of Australia’s nicest, warmest characters – epitomized by Julie Rafter in the smash hit, Packed to the Rafters.

Rebecca Gibney and her Packed to the Rafters co-star Erik Thomson.

So it was something of a shock to see her take on Lola, the beer swilling, burping, burger-eating, checkout chick in Wanted (second season on Channel Seven soon.)

She and her producer husband, Richard Bell, created and co-produced Wanted because Lola had been “buzzing around in her head” for years.

When Seven asked her to play someone “rougher and with more edge”, Lola came to life.

“I have an inner Lola. I think that’s me,” Gibney says.

“I never knew what I wanted to do. I thought for a time I wanted to be the first woman Prime Minister of New Zealand and then I thought I’d be a nurse or a psychologist.

“Then I dropped out of school so I thought, ‘Well that’s blown that chance of doing something worthwhile because I don’t have an education’.”

There are other surprising characters lurking in her brain, including one she developed for a film role she didn’t get.

“I love the character I created. She’s quite demonic, just mad in a good way, completely bonkers – and I haven’t played that yet.”

A sneak peek of a photo of Rebecca as that character reveals a quite shocking transformation. But that’s her story for another day.