8 Thursday February 3 2022 | the timesarts
ADRIAN LOURIE/EVENING STANDARDThe woman
reinventing
the rom-com
The New Zealand comic Rose Matafeo
tells Alice Jones about bringing back
Starstruck, the much-loved TV comedy
to mix things up I would sometimes
write in the gap between my bed and
my radiator, on the ground, to feel like,
‘Oh, this is new.’ It’s no way to write.
That lockdown was bleak.” She now
lives alone.
Matafeo turns 30 this year and has
been doing comedy for half her life,
since trying out stand-up as part of a
summer programme at New Zealand
Comedy Festival as a teenager. She
started gigging in Auckland aged 16,
got a job presenting on the New
Zealand youth TV channel U aged 19
and then became a writer and star on
the sketch show Funny Girls. When
she won the Edinburgh Comedy
award — previously known as the
Perrier — aged 26, she was the first
woman of colour and the fifth woman
to win it since it began in 1981.
Apart from filming Horndog for
BBC3, Matafeo has not returned to
live comedy. That’s partly because the
circuit has barely recovered from the
pandemic, partly because she has been
busy filming, but mainly because she
doesn’t feel the need. “I’m sick of
having opinions,” she says.
Instead, she has been “tinkering
around”, making films on a 16mm
camera. “I was very lucky to be doing
comedy in my twenties but part of me
feels like I missed out on a time in my
life where I could mess around doing
weird shit, going to film school and
just experimenting.”
She has no plans for a third series of
Starstruck — yet, but the love story of
Jessie and Tom feels as if it could run
and run. “It’s a story that you could
come back to in five years and it would
still feel somewhat relevant. Insecurity
will always exist. Miscommunications,
stubbornness, pride... As long as
humans are around, those are the
unchanging elements of love stories,”
Matafeo says. “I honestly know
nothing of the modern world, but give
me an argument between two people,
I’ll figure that one out.”are people of colour, which
shouldn’t be radical but
somehow still is on British
television. “Our identities
are part of our characters,
but they’re not the
narrative,” says Matafeo,
whose father is Samoan and
mother is Scottish-
Croatian. “When you’re brown, when
you’re mixed race, when you’re a
woman, the sign of progress
is that that’s not a thing to consider.
Watching a love story and it
not be surprising that it’s not a
white couple on screen — the day
when that’s not a thing is going to
be amazing.”
She wrote Starstruck with Alice
Snedden, her friend and a fellow
New Zealand comedian. Just as they
were about to begin shooting in 2020,
coronavirus shut production down.
Matafeo left London for Auckland,
where she ended up living with her
septuagenarian grandmother in
lockdown for months on end. “I
watched a lot of Amazing Grace and
MasterChef,” she says. “It was a pretty
unique experience. We got to know
each other really well. It’s quite an
amazing thing to get on the nerves of
your nan — usually people don’t have
such a close relationship.”
She and Snedden wrote a second
series of Starstruck while they waited,
but as soon as they began shooting the
first series in October 2020, they
binned it. “It just didn’t feel right. So
we basically threw out six whole
scripts.” They shot the first series in six
weeks then started rewriting the
second — Matafeo in London and
Snedden in Auckland. “Which was
hell, to be honest.”
Matafeo wrote in her tiny bedroom
in the tiny flat she shared with the
comedy actors Emma Sidi and Al
Roberts — a real-life couple who play
Jessie’s flatmate, Kate, and Kate’s
boyfriend, Ian, in Starstruck. “Honestlybegins on Monday, and the action
picks up seconds after the first ended,
with Jessie seemingly choosing to miss
her flight home to New Zealand to
stay in London with Tom. Despite
her big gesture, the couple are still
awkwardly dancing around
each other, unable to say how
they really feel.
“He was just being polite,”
Jessie says of choosing to
spend Christmas alone rather
than accepting Tom’s invitation
to spend it with his family.
“And in return I was being
polite by saying no. We all got
what we wanted.”
Starstruck is Matafeo’s first
sitcom. She began writing it
four years ago at the same time
as her most recent live stand-up
show, Horndog, which won the
2018 Edinburgh Comedy award.
If the latter was a mile-a-minute
paean to the very specific loves
and obsessions of Matafeo’s teenage
years and early twenties — Alex
Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand; digital
cameras; crocheting — Starstruck is a
hymn to love itself. She knew she
wanted to create something “beautiful
and dreamlike”, and lists Cary Grant,
Barefoot in the Park and Julie Delpy in
the Before Sunset/Sunrise films as
influences. “Dialogue and throwing
things back and forth is the hottest
thing you can watch,” she says. “There
was an era of classic films I love that
weren’t shy of clever dialogue.”
A beguiling mix of old soul and
youthful enthusiasm, Matafeo is
“obsessed” with the past. “Everything
I love is not from now,” she says. She
pursues hobbies with the zeal of the
recently retired; at Christmas, during a
bout of Covid, she crocheted herself a
scarf. “It might be whittling next
month,” she says. “I look to retired
dads and I envy them. I want a shed.”
For all that, there is much about
Starstruck that is quietly radical. Her
starting point was seeing other
comedians who wrote vehicles for
themselves. “It’s always men who cast
much hotter women as their love
interests. That absolutely needs to
change. Steve Martin, Albert Brooks,
Woody Allen — they always cast the
most stunning women.
“I respect and admire radical action,
and I’m also a fan of sneaking it in,”
she adds. “I can inject that into the
world of a story you can enjoy without
feeling like you’re being told anything.”
Like the fact that Starstruck is a
romantic comedy with two leads whoR
ose Matafeo is sitting
in an armchair in her
flat in east London,
talking about romance
and polishing off an
egg sandwich left over
from last night’s
dinner. (“In a bachelor
way, I thought I should save half for
today.. .”) The New Zealand comedian
and actress is a “total romantic”, as
anyone who has seen her charming
BBC comedy Starstruck may guess.
She loves old Hollywood, rat-a-tat
repartee, furious tiffs and passionate
make-ups, flirting, swooning and daft,
outsized emotional gestures. Her
favourite film is Sweet Charity, about
a woman who refuses to give up on
the idea of love despite repeatedly
being let down by it.
“That makes sense to me,” says
Matafeo, who is wearing scarlet-
rimmed glasses, a turtleneck, tracksuit
bottoms and a blanket over her knees.
A poster of the Eighties comedy The
Big Chill hangs on the wall behind her.
“It’s nice to see something that’s not
ashamed to be romantic. I think lots
of people are embarrassed to like or
be interested in love. There’s a cringe
element to it.”
In Starstruck she plays Jessie, a
lightly chaotic twentysomething who
works in a cinema (and on a flower
stall, and as a nanny), and has what
begins as a one-night stand with Tom
(Nikesh Patel), not realising he is a
famous actor until the morning after.
The first series has been streamed
almost five million times on iPlayer,
making it BBC3’s biggest comedy of
last year and announcing the arrival
of Matafeo as a star and a kind of
millennial Nora Ephron, here and in
America, where the show streamed on
HBO Max. With its twinkly vision of
London, where love lurks around
every corner, people dance in the
streets and smooth jazz soundtracks
every bus journey, the rom-com
seemed to tap into a collective
yearning for connection, chance
encounters, escape. “Oh God, yes,”
Matafeo says. “Everyone was in the
middle of lockdown, had not been on
dates, had not touched anyone.. .” She
sobs, theatrically. “Remember dating?”
Like Notting Hill before it, Starstruck
plays on the inherent comedy of the
dynamic between Jessie, a “civilian” (as
Tom’s agent, a superbly acid Minnie
Driver, puts it) and Tom, a celebrity.
In an early episode she leaves his
house and is mistaken by the paparazzi
for his cleaner. The second seriesSeries two of Starstruck
starts on BBC3 on
February 7 at 10pm,
with the entire box set
released on iPlayerRose Matafeo at the
Soho Theatre in
London and, above,
with Nikesh Patel in
StarstruckIt’s alwaysmen whocast muchhotterwomen astheir loveinterests.That needsto change