Rose Matafeo is in her bed in London when she answers my Zoom call. “You like this crazy angle?” she says breezily in her Auckland accent, the screen flooded with her impressively bouncy curls. Matafeo’s effortlessly curly hair becomes something of a signature look on Starstruck, the six-part BBC romantic comedy series she created and starred in. Matafeo plays Jessie in the series, which she co-wrote with her best friend, Alice Snedden—a floundering 28-year-old movie house employee spinning her wheels in London who has a one-night stand with Tom, a Tom Cruise-esque action film star played by British-Indian actor Nikesh Patel. In short, Starstruck is an inverse Notting Hill—this time, famous man falls for everyday girl. And much like that movie, Matafeo’s show has critics swooning. The series currently has 100% critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes, with Vanity Fair’s Cassie DaCosta praising its “elusive, ineffable charm.”
Matafeo’s lying down because she’s just finished a long day of shooting the second season of Starstruck, which was renewed by HBO Max before it even debuted on the streaming platform. “They’re announcing it properly next week, but I obviously already just posted a photo on Instagram,” she says. That day, they’d been shooting in a London park and drawing some interested onlookers. “I want to get on Deux Moi. That’s the fucking thing,” says Matafeo, before going on a comedic tear about what she does and does not want to see on the infamous gossip Instagram. “I don’t want to fucking see Ramona [Singer] without her mask again. I want to see [Starstruck] filming. I want to see Succession pics.”
Matafeo has never had trouble forming an opinion. A self-described nerd who never played sports, the New Zealand native discovered she liked comedy at the age of 15, choosing to spend her two-week school vacation taking comedy classes. She stuck with the discipline through her teens and “accidentally kept doing it” in her 20s, touring in New Zealand and Australia before landing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “The years where I could have gotten an actual skill or, like, a degree or anything like that sort of flew by, and then I arrived to my late 20s going ‘Well, I’m committed to this now, so I should try and make it work.”
You could say it’s worked out pretty well. In 2018, Matafeo won the prestigious comedy award for best show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, making her the first person of color to do so for a solo show. (Matafeo is Samoan on her father’s side.) The show, Horndog, dives headfirst into her teenage obsessions with everything from K-Pop to her well-documented lust for Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand—that obsessive, passionate love that’s the hallmark of teenage girlhood. In the special, Matafeo manages to pop off an Armie Hammer joke that’s eerily prescient of the actor’s recent scandal: “I don’t even like Armie Hammer, but I want to both fuck him and eat him.” Which begs the question: what did Rose Matafeo know, and when did she know it?” “Oh my fucking God. When it got released in the U.K I was like, ‘we have to cut that,’” she recalls, somewhat amazed. “I tried to choose the most innocuous, bland, beige fucking actor [for the joke]. It’s so funny that it proved the point: How can we trust men at a time like this?”
The same question is central to Starstruck. Over the course of the series, we watch as Matafeo’s hapless Jessie tries to decide whether she will or won’t with Patel’s uber-famous Tom. “Starstruck is my slight obsession with love and romance,” says Matafeo. “I feel like a romantic person who enjoys just the topic of love. [Love is] a galvanizing and compelling story to watch and force to be reckoned with.”
Matafeo calls Starstruck a “six-part romantic comedy,” and found inspiration in several of the genre’s standard-bearers: Notting Hill, Moonstruck, and When Harry Met Sally, specifically the latter’s jazzy score. One romantic comedy, however, holds a particular place in Matafeo’s heart. “Bridget Jones[‘s Diary] is just, I think, one of the best films ever made,” she says, with complete conviction. “And I watched it every week when I was 17 years old. It was an obsession. It was really bad. I know that movie like the back of my hand.”
While she reveres romantic comedies of yore, Matafeo intentionally tried to break the mold with Starstruck. Before Horndog, she had a standup show called “Sexy Best Friend”—based on the premise that if she were to be cast in a romantic comedy, that’s the part she’d most likely play. “I am ethnically ambiguous, and I’ve got curly hair, and I am the one who’ll say something like ‘sexy’ and then never be heard of again,” she jokes. (In Starstruck, Jessie’s sidekick is played by Emma Sidi, who also happens to be one of Matafeo’s flatmates and IRL best friends.) In the show, she sang a version of Rihanna’s “Work” that replaced the titular word with “white” as images of romcom ingenues like Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts were projected onto screens behind her.
“One thing that I would have liked to have seen as a younger teenager who was obsessed with romcoms was a character who looked like me,” she says. “I never saw anything, superficially I suppose, that connected to myself… So I thought it would be fucking cool to have a romantic comedy with people who you encounter every day [that] felt more realistic.”
By centering Jessie and and Tom, Starstruck takes a step away from the lily-white days of yore while expanding the notion of what interracial couples can look like on screen. “Let’s normalize people who aren’t white just being in love, but also not having to talk about the fact that they’re not white,” Matafeo says. “It’s almost a shame that it’s like, a refreshing thing to see.”
What’s also refreshing about Jessie and Tom is their chemistry—the most crucial element in every romantic comedy. Matafeo says it took “a very long casting process” to find someone who could pull off Tom’s charm and humor without “being a dick.” The hardest part, according to Matafeo, was landing on “a guy you genuinely believed found a woman funny.”
“That’s one of the amazing things about someone like Nikesh,” she says, “who was not only funny himself and is a fantastic actor—but also knows that, like, a funny woman is attractive, and that’s the chemistry. I think there’s chemistry in that.”
Creating the character she was meant to fall in love with onscreen made Matafeo feel a little, well, odd. “Writing your own love interest is fucking weird,” she says, wryly. “You feel like this weird puppet master. You feel like you’re writing your own fanfic.” But the genre’s history helped soothe her misgivings. “I’m dressing this man up in the things I think are attractive and he says something attractive to me, which is so weirdly uncomfortable. And then I realized, oh my god: men have done this throughout the history of cinema… Every time I felt like a prick for being in a rom com that I wrote, I was like oh Steve Martin did it, Albert Brooks did it, oh, he who shall not be named Woody Allen did it.”
Allen notwithstanding, Matafeo is proud to have put her own unique stamp on her favorite genre. “People don’t realize that some of the best films ever made are rom coms,” she says. “They piss on the genre if they hear it because they hate women, I guess? So, yeah, I think we’ve gotta revitalize that genre. Amazing shit can be written.”
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