This was published 9 months ago
Starstruck made Rose Matafeo famous, then fans got strange
By Hannah Story
Comedian Rose Matafeo has returned to stand-up for the first time in six years.
Rose Matafeo is thinking about retiring. She’s just bought her first home, in London, where the Kiwi comedian has lived for almost a decade. “I’m a home owner. I never thought I would ever own a home. My parents don’t own a home, so I beat them,” she says, with a laugh.
She might take up gardening as she ponders what she’ll do now that Starstruck, her BAFTA-nominated sitcom, has wrapped up after three seasons. “At what other point of my life am I going to basically be able to live a truly semi-retired life in the middle of my life when I can enjoy it? But also I am available for all jobs and castings, if anyone is reading this,” she says.
Not that she has been idle since Starstruck ended. She’s just finished shooting Junior Taskmaster, where she is the Taskmaster, judging contestants aged between nine and 11 on their efforts completing a series of seemingly meaningless tasks. She knows the series intimately, having placed second in season nine of the adult competition in 2019. “Taskmaster was a huge thing for just people knowing who you are in the UK. It kind of went from ‘who is that person?’ to ‘oh, that person is from Taskmaster’,” she says.
Matafeo has also been working on her first stand-up show since her breakthrough Horndog in 2018, which won her the top prize at Edinburgh Fringe and a nomination for most outstanding show at Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It was later filmed as a special for HBO Max.
She returns to Melbourne comedy festival later this month with her new show On and On and On. During her last Melbourne run Matafeo wrote the pilot for Starstruck. In the series she played Jessie, who unwittingly has a one-night stand with Hollywood movie star Tom (Nikesh Patel).
In Starstruck, Rose Matafeo played Jessie, a 20-something who sleeps with a Hollywood star.Credit:
Over three seasons Jessie and Tom’s relationship played out, from budding romance to drudgery, from break-up to rekindling, to being ex-partners in the same social circle. They’re inexplicably drawn to each other, even as they come to grips with the truth that they want different things from their lives.
It was the end of Starstruck that prompted Matafeo to revisit stand-up. Following the success of Horndog she took a step back from live comedy.
As her popularity grew, it became harder to return to the stage as fans started digging through her social media for clues about her personal life. “I felt really uncomfortable doing stand-up and trying to talk about my life, and then people knowing about your life in a way that felt very strange,” she says.
But last year she decided to write a new show anyway – and not to worry about what an audience might expect from her. “I do find stand-up scary in that sense where I’m just very hard on myself,” she says. “So it’s hard to keep true to what you want to be and what you want to make and how you want to express yourself, as opposed to slightly pandering to an audience who have an expectation of what you’re going to do.”
Matafeo started in stand-up at just 15, participating in New Zealand Comedy Trust’s free Class Comedians workshop. She recalls having a keen interest in drama, writing and the trivia on Fantales packaging, but she doesn’t remember exactly why she wanted to give comedy a try. “There must have been something there that I was like, ‘I want to do that’. I could have just been a precocious teenager wanting to show off, but in a slightly coy way,” she says. “I maintain I’m not a funny person at all. But I know that trying to be funny, you get a positive result with that. Maybe it’s just the ultimate level of people-pleasing.”
Matafeo has been performing stand-up since she was just 15 years old.Credit:
At the time, she would go to the library to burn comedy albums by Mitch Hedberg, Maria Bamford and Paul F. Tompkins, and she and her friends, including fellow comic Guy Williams, would swap USBs of those albums and pirated episodes of British panel shows.
“I loved watching comedy. I loved comedy films. I loved watching every sitcom available on television,” she says. “I remember reading SeinLanguage by Jerry Seinfeld when I was like 11 or 12 from the library.”
A year after taking part in Class Comedians, Matafeo was a finalist in New Zealand International Comedy Festival’s Raw Comedy Quest, and by 18 she had won the festival’s best newcomer award. In 2013, aged 21, she won the festival’s Billy T Award for up-and-coming talent, and two years later she co-created and starred in sketch comedy series Funny Girls. After 10 years of performing stand-up, at the age of 26, Matafeo garnered widespread acclaim with Horndog.
“It feels a little bit like I’m a different person now. I’m more confident in what I’m saying and that’s a cool thing that comes with just getting a bit older,” the 32-year-old says. “My stand-up was deeply rooted in very self-effacing, self-deprecating kind of stuff, and that’s still massively what I do, but it’s with a little bit more affection or love to oneself. It’s like, it’s fine. It’s very hard to be alive and human. It’s a kinder perspective on things. But possibly more anxiety.”
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO ROSE MATAFEO
- Worst habit? Rolling my eyes when people are talking without realising it.
- Greatest fear? Falling in love with an AI just because they’re moderately kind to me.
- The line that stayed with you? “Be yourself” – from a YouTube video of a man teaching me how to eat watermelon properly.
- Biggest regret? Leaving my wife for Elizabeth Taylor.
- Favourite room? The kitchen because that’s where the chutneys and preserves live.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? Playing With the Boys by Kenny Loggins. I was actually working on something very similar before he released that.
- If you could solve one thing … Who the Zodiac killer is so people can stop suggesting it was me. I’m too young and gorgeous!
The solitude and self-reflection of the COVID years led Matafeo to write her new show about life in her early 30s – a time when friends are getting married and having children, while she’s going on dates. “It’s a f---ing weird time,” she says. She describes how, in your early 30s, the things that you’ve been working towards may have come to fruition but you don’t necessarily know how to enjoy them.
“You’re doing the things you’ve been planning to do or dreaming of. You’ve worked all through your 20s to achieve something but ‘holy shit, I don’t know how to sit down for a second’,” she says. “You’re also future-proofing yourself. You’re like, ‘how am I going to start planning now for when I have no children, and I’m trying to employ AI robots to wipe my ass in some sort of bougie care home? I’ve gotta get on to that right now.’”
“That’s the anxiety of this age of your life: where I’m going isn’t as full of possibility as what I was looking towards in my childhood or earlier adulthood, and where I’ve been feels like a blip.”
Matafeo returned to live comedy last year, testing and refining her material in local rooms and through work-in-progress shows. A strange year to be performing in Britain, following sexual assault allegations against Russell Brand?
“I mean, it’s a shit-show,” Matafeo says. “But that was like an open-secret vibe. It’s a front-facing scandal in a front-facing industry, [which makes you think], ‘f--- me, how much does this happen in every money-making corporate entity?’”
Matafeo feels lucky that she has never been in a situation like the ones faced by other women working in comedy. “It’s a hard, ghostly enemy to try to defeat,” she says. “Because it’s this huge spectrum of behaviour, isn’t it? And if you don’t have everyone trying to be as diligent as possible at every point of it, it’s f---ed.”
Many bookers try their best to do the right thing, she says – including booking diverse, gender-balanced line-ups. But even that comes with challenges for artists like her.
When she won the Edinburgh Comedy Award, Matafeo, whose father is Samoan, became the first solo person of colour to win, and one of only five women or non-binary people to win in the award’s 37-year history (none have won since).
Matafeo with past Edinburgh Comedy Award winners Steve Coogan and John Robins.Credit: Robbie Jack/Corbis via Getty images
“As a brown woman, you’re like, what box am I ticking on this line-up?” she says. “That’s a huge impostor-syndrome situation for performers who aren’t historically part of the majority of stand-ups.”
She says it’s often people from marginalised groups doing the work to make change in the industry. “The onus shouldn’t be on them to yell out for this stuff. It should be the people who are the majority trying to include people in a way that’s very overdue.”
She thinks people perceive comedy as an extracurricular activity, despite its contribution to the economy. That’s reflected in a lack of funding for comedians and the wider industry, especially in New Zealand. And that lack of support can mean people from different backgrounds don’t take it up.
“If you can’t make money you’re not going to do it,” she says. “Stand-up and comedy is not treated in the same way in the arts world as other things. It’s not seen as I think what it can be, which is a really incredible –” she stops herself mid-sentence. “OK, I can’t even say it because I know I’ll be quoted on it, and I’m not going to say it’s ‘artistic’ in any way, although it can be. It’s on its way to being there.
“It’s underestimated as a form of performing that is really important. And that’s possibly why there are fewer diverse voices in it.”
But for all her criticisms on an industry level, Matafeo thinks she will always come back to live comedy: “What a f---ing cool, self-sufficient mode of making a living doing what you like, and being in complete control of it. What an amazing gift.”
Rose Matafeo: On and On and On is at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, March 28-April 7. www.comedyfestival.com.au
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