Baby Done: Rose Matafeo on Harry Potter fangirling, motherhood and tree climbing

If you made a fool of yourself as a young teenager, you wouldn’t expect that to come up in your very professional adult career, right?

Fifteen years ago, New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo was barely a teenager as she lined up at a fan convention for Harry Potter star Matthew Lewis’s autograph. They even took a photo together.

So, when all these years later, Lewis (unrecognisable from his Neville Longbottom days) was cast opposite Matafeo as her romantic counterpart in the charismatic Kiwi rom-com Baby Done, she knew she had to confront her little geek-out moment.

“I showed him the photo, I had to dig it up from a friend,” Matafeo told news.com.au over Zoom. “I showed it to him, and he was deeply entertained. We both looked hilarious.

“I had an army coat on, rocking out my 13-year-old self, it was deeply embarrassing but it was an important part of my history, and his history as well. I had to address that.”

As expected, Lewis didn’t remember the fleeting encounter – “Of course he didn’t remember me, but he did remember the top that he was wearing, a jacket that had a T-shirt attached. It was 2005, fashion was different.”

Uncowed by her once fangirling self – “I am an adult woman now, and cooler than I possibly was at 13” – Matafeo quickly became work friends with “normal guy” Lewis.

Rose Matafeo and Matthew Lewis in Kiwi comedy Baby Done

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And they had to, considering the on-screen journey their characters had to take in Baby Done, a tender, funny and, depending on your views towards parenthood, triggering film.

It was written by Sophie Henderson, directed by Curtis Vowell and counts among its producers, Taika Waititi. Co-stars include Kiwi comedy stars Madeleine Sami, Rachel House and Emily Barclay.

Matafeo’s Zoe is a 20-something arborist with dreams of making it to the Tree Climbing Championships in Canada. All around her, mates are popping out babies while Zoe looks on with severe disinterest – she wants to travel and do things, clutching onto her silver fern passport like it’s a lifeline.

When she and partner Tim (Lewis) finds themselves unexpectedly pregnant, and rather far along, Zoe has something of a breakdown. A baby wasn’t on the cards. Not at all.

So Zoe starts to do everything to prove that she’s still “her”, which includes a hold-your-bladder-hilarious scene involving some molly.

Even though she doesn’t have kids, has “absolutely” no plans to have kids anytime soon and “can’t stand” baby showers, taking on the role didn’t faze Matafeo, who still found Zoe’s situation relatable.

“Because I know what it is like to have anxiety and freak out totally over a situation,” Matafeo said. “I was like ‘oh, I can tap into that for sure with this character’.

“I think a lot of people can relate to a lot of that, which is basically anyone who’s freaked out about massive life-changing decisions happening to them. It’s a bit of a freak-out about your identity.”

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Zoe’s denial of her situation is an uncommon screen trait – TV and movies tend to portray would-be mothers as excited and happy. Only now are the varied experiences of new mothers being explored.

Matafeo loved that Baby Done was a movie that challenged the norm of how we tend to think of motherhood.

“I’m amazed that it’s still such a prevalent expectation of women, that it’s their function in society,” she said. “And also, the expectation that all pregnancies are the same and that all people react to it in the same way.

“Zoe reacts to it in an incredibly extreme way, which I’ve now realised is something many people relate to because that’s exactly the same thing that they went through.

“There are so many amazing, strong women in your life, and they have strong personalities and just because they go through this, it’s not like they stop being themselves.

“I think it’s just a sh*t thing how society puts them into a category of ‘oh, yes, you were this woman, but now you’re a pregnant woman’. And then after that ‘you’re a mother, and that’s your role’.

“Motherhood is so many things and there’s no one path to it. That’s something that really isn’t represented so much in films. So that’s a really cool thing about this film.

“It’s a movie for the whole family to enjoy, and particularly if you want to test someone, figuring out if they want kids or not – a deep, confronting conversation after the movie at dinner!”

Baby Done is Matafeo’s first lead role, landing the part after helping Henderson workshop the script during the writing stage.

She had previously been in supporting parts or as part of ensembles in shows including Squinters and Funny Girls and film The Breaker Upperers. She’s been doing stand-up comedy since she was 15 years old, taking her shows around the world and even has an HBO special.

Throughout lockdown, she crocheted a jumper, made too many pineapple and coconut buns, learnt a Janet Jackson dance and retaught herself the ukulele and the mandolin.

She promised she won’t inflict her mandolin playing on an unsuspecting audience, but that her ukulele skills are “actually OK”.

Another recently acquired skill was tree climbing, thanks to Zoe’s arboreal ambitions.

Rose Matafeo can now list tree climbing on her CV

“I have a new-found respect for arborists,” she recounted, after sharing the highest she went up a tree was 15 or 20 metres up. “We had to learn how to climb trees, I properly climbed some trees. I even know the kind of arborist trousers you have to wear.

“We had some real arborists in the scene where we had the tree climbing champs. It was very nerve wracking having to be up in a tree and all these arborists are watching and being like ‘she can’t climb, that’s not real’.

“Never met a more passionate group of people who were so passionate about their craft. They love trees and they love being arborists.”

Maybe she’s not giving herself enough credit because Matafeo seemed pretty passionate about working on Baby Done.

“It was full-on, I was essentially in every scene, and in every shooting day, for an entire film. On the one day that I wasn’t on, I still came to set to see it because I missed everyone. It was like I had Stockholm syndrome.”

Baby Done is in cinemas from Thursday, October 22 (excluding Victoria)

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