Was there ever a greater discrepancy between talent and confidence? Rose Matafeo, at 25, is an award-winning standup, a TV star in her native New Zealand and made a striking Edinburgh fringe debut last summer. That show wasn’t perfect, but Matafeo’s force of personality – dominant, dorky-excitable – was a sight to behold. Here was a comedian whose power couldn’t be denied. Except by Matafeo herself, it turns out, whose stellar charisma on stage is matched by subterranean self-esteem off it.
This becomes clear over coffee as Matafeo girds herself for a return to Edinburgh with her new show, Sassy Best Friend. When I ask what it is about her comedy that is winning such acclaim, Matafeo squirms with discomfort. “That’s the most uncomfortable position to put someone like me in,” she says. “I’m not going to be forced to answer that.”
When I press, she replies (agonised syntax intact): “I wouldn’t say I always have the talent to do something – I think I definitely probably have a moderate amount of talent – but I can pretend to have confidence or, I guess, charisma …” She tapers off. “It’s so hard to look at myself like that. Why can’t I give myself a compliment? It’s bizarre! It’s terrible.”
Her excuse – that all New Zealanders are self-deprecating – barely begins to explain it. But this exchange is characteristic. She is even self-abasing about her ethnicity, having once described herself as feeling like a bad Samoan “because my dad never spoke it to me” and because she’s considered “too white”. (Her Croatian-Scottish mother recently sold up in New Zealand to move to Uganda to teach.)
Matafeo took up standup as a 15-year-old. “I just fell into it,” she says, “because it sounded like a fun thing to do. And I liked that I was completely in control of it, which is a rare experience for a teenager.” Last year’s Edinburgh show, which clownishly imagined her own funeral, came at you like a 10-tonne truck with its Aerosmith karaoke and dotty role plays, celeb impersonations and tap dancing. But Matafeo seldom enjoys performing it, she says, because “the nerves so far outweigh the positives. Everyone says” – and she puts on a macho voice – “‘when you get offstage, the adrenaline rush is soooo good.’ And I’m like, no, it’s just absolute relief that that thing is over!”
She tells me: “I would hate to be a standup comedian for ever. It would not be good. It would be the worst.” She nurses film-making ambitions, but in the meantime we’ve got Sassy Best Friend, of which Matafeo seems discreetly proud. It was inspired, she says, by personality quizzes in the magazines she read as a girl, in which “there’s an obsession for girls figuring out who they are”. Matafeo figures that out on stage, while referencing her “favourite film heroes”, taking down sexist hip-hop lyrics and describing how the contraceptive pill made her “insane”.
That sequence has made the biggest impact, Matafeo says. Audiences have been “80% female” and eager to share their own tales of pill-based mania. In New Zealand, Matafeo is the writer and star of TV sketch show Funny Girls. The biggest complaint about it, she tells me, is: “‘Why can’t the show be for all people?’ Which is amazing, given that most stuff is made for everyone, and if not, then it’s specifically for men.”
Another subject addressed in Sassy Best Friend is the loneliness Matafeo suffered when she moved to London two years ago. There was a profound jolt, she says, from working full-time on a TV show with her best friends, to a solo comedian’s life thousands of miles from home. Her only colleagues were standups (she flat-shared with Nish Kumar; her then-boyfriend was James Acaster), “who you see for about an hour a night, then the rest of the time you’re alone, writing or doing nothing.”
Opening up about that experience on stage feels worthwhile: “Most of what I like doing in performing is connecting with an audience. What’s the point of doing standup if you’re not doing that?” In the absence of any own-trumpet-blowing from Matafeo, let me state outright: she’s very good at it, even if standup may struggle to hold on to this effervescent new star. “I’m very ambitious. I’m the kind of person who still feels as if they could win an Oscar. Albeit,” she says, characteristically, “with no evidence to support that expectation whatsoever.”
- Sassy Best Friend is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
