Rose Matafeo is arguably the breakout star of 2021. Her BBC Three sitcom Starstruck became the channel’s best-performing comedy within weeks of launch, racking up 3m views and earning a second series before it even premiered. The impact was so huge and immediate that you could be forgiven for thinking she had dropped from the sky fully formed.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. After winning a New Zealand international comedy festival award for standup in 2007, at the age of 15, Matafeo has conquered just about everything she has ever attempted. She has written for Daily Show-esque satirical news programmes. She has presented entertainment shows. She co-created and starred in a sketch series, and has directed sitcoms. In 2018, her show Horndog – detailing, in part, how she was kicked off a Franz Ferdinand messageboard for being “too racy” – won an Edinburgh comedy award. And last year she was the lead in the film Baby Done, executive produced by Taika Waititi.
And yet, even for those of us who knew her work, Starstruck was the perfect showcase for all of Matafeo’s talents. Despite a premise that wasn’t entirely novel – like Notting Hill before it, it told the story of a civilian who accidentally fell in love with a movie star – Matafeo’s presence helped to reset and update a number of hoary old romcom tropes. Equal parts confident and anxious, for a few weeks in April, she was more or less all anyone could talk about. She’s a big deal now. She is also exhausted.
“I’m having a lie-down,” says the 29-year-old New Zealander over the phone from London. Series two of Starstruck is almost complete, marking the end of a two-year treadmill for her, and she is deliberately choosing to pause. “I’ve got no work plans for next year and it’s great,” she says. “I really want to watch about a hundred movies and possibly, I don’t know, just chill out.”
It’s a nice idea, but Matafeo isn’t convinced it’ll stick. “I will hate it,” she sighs. “I’ll hate it because I have nothing to do and it will kill me.”
Part of the issue seems to be that, as wildly as Starstruck was received, she didn’t have any time to enjoy its success. “I had one day,” she says. “Not even one day. The first series came out on iPlayer at 6am the day before we started shooting the second series.” To compound things, the entire series showed up at once and people quickly discovered that the best way to consume it was in one sitting, like a movie.
“Straight away the audience was like, ‘Great! When’s the next one coming out?’,” recalls Matafeo. “I thought, this is like a gut punch! It’s really flattering, like, that’s great! But oh my God! It freaks me out, you know?”
Ultimately, though, the lack of a break can only be good for Starstruck. With no downtime between series, Matafeo and her writing partner Alice Snedden didn’t have time to bow to the pressures of fan service, so they didn’t have to second-guess themselves.
“It’s scary because you go, ‘Maybe we didn’t write what the audience wanted’,” she says. “You know, people really love the show and you see a lot of series step it up extensively for series two. But it’s actually nice not having that, because it means that we’ve made a second series that we like. It was consistent and in keeping with the spirit of the first one. I’m a terrible people-pleaser so I think it was good not to have that little voice in my head.”
Since we’re here to talk about Matafeo’s 2021, it made sense to ask her about the things she enjoyed watching. The short answer is “nothing current” – she caught up with 2019’s Watchmen in February, and adored it – but for the most part she fell back on old favourites. “I became kind of emotionally reliant on Dawson’s Creek,” she says. “I think I still am. Honestly, I got in deep with that and it saved me. It pulled me out of some dark places.”
Fittingly, for a woman whose character worked in one, Matafeo has also been taking advantage of the cinemas reopening. “I’ve been going back to the BFI, back to the Prince Charles [cinema in Leicester Square], where I’ve been doing some screenings of Beverly Hills Cop one and two, my favourite films. And been really diving into my interest in more obscure 60s movies that you have to find on some bootleg weird zone on DVD.
“But, yeah,” she continues, “it’s been a year of doing hobbies and stuff. When you’re making TV in particular, you look at a screen all day and then when you come home, you’re like ‘I don’t want to look at a screen’. So it’s been a year of getting into model making. I bought a bass guitar. I’m trying to shred on bass guitar. I just got into 16mm film cameras and learned all about that, so it’s been a year of nerd-dom, and I love it.”
That’s real self-improvement territory, I say. “It’s borderline,” she says, laughing. “Self-improvement slash self-sabotage in terms of now I spend my money on cameras and I’m not seeing anyone.”
Our time is coming to a close, and I’m concerned that Matafeo doesn’t realise how much people enjoyed Starstruck. So I reassert the notion, going on at some length about all the ways I loved it. And I really did. In another year that has been marked by a general sense of gloom, the unapologetic loveliness of Starstruck felt like the shot in the arm we all needed.
“Aw, that’s really kind! I’m so glad so many people have liked it, and I hope when the second series comes out, they’ll still like it,” Matafeo replies. She pauses, and checks herself. “But also I don’t care because, you know, whatever.”
