Rose Matafeo is bad at endings. So bad that, after stepping away from standup in 2018, the New Zealand-born comic is now back with a new show, On and On and On. The return was prompted by some significant endings in her life: bereavement, breakups, her TV show Starstruck, her 20s. “I was surprised with how bad I was at all types of ending,” she says. “The show is me coming to terms with that. Things end: it’s not the end of the world.”
Since Matafeo’s 2018 show Horndog earned her the Edinburgh comedy award, there hasn’t been much time for standup. She starred in the film Baby Done, appeared on Taskmaster, was appointed host of Junior Taskmaster and made three series of Starstruck with her co-writer Alice Snedden.
When death and breakups arrived just as she was editing the final series of Starstruck, “I went into a real hole of Buddhism podcasts, because I was totally spun out,” she says. It’s debatable whether it helped: “It’s the idea that impermanence is the only certain thing in life. It’s the most terrifying thought in the world. And the only way you’ll find peace.”
She returned to the “immediacy” of standup, where you can have a thought one morning and discuss it on stage that night, to explore these ideas. “That was very helpful. And fun. And you get a show out of it – that’s cool.”
Today, we’re in London chatting over tea and the most antipodean item on the menu – a platter of lamingtons, which are light sponges coated in coconut. Having been in London for nearly a decade, she received indefinite leave to remain in the UK last year. “I don’t know if I ever expected to be here this long,” she says. She feels connected to New Zealand – it’s where her career began and she still has family there – and committing to London means a life with “one foot in, one foot out”.
So what made her stay? She loves the city’s cinemas (she featured two favourites in Starstruck, and last year programmed films at another), the buses and “good friends, good comedy”.
“I’ve spent most of my 20s here and that is such a formative time,” she says. “If you go through enough life crises in a certain country, you deserve that fucking passport!”
Life crises are the meat of On and On and On. She debuted it at this year’s Edinburgh fringe; now she’s doing an extended London run and filming it for release – her second comedy special.
She has been doing standup on and off since she was 15, thanks to a New Zealand initiative giving kids the mentorship of professional comics, and she has won the biggest prize in comedy. And yet: “Performing will never be easy for me. I think I have stage fright,” Matafeo says. “I do find that slightly confusing about myself. I’m like, ‘Why are you making a show? No one asked you to.’ Yet I have this urge to write an hour about my feelings and talk about it on stage.”
Matafeo, now 32, posits on stage that breakups in your 30s hit harder because your personality is locked in. Yet she is uncomfortable quantifying her own personality, other than one certainty: “I’m an introvert,” she says. “I’m projecting a very different idea of myself on stage, a much more extroverted version, louder than in real life. I’m almost mute off stage.”
She is embracing her introversion now. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘Do I want to go to this party? Do I want to speak to this person?’ I don’t think I used to have the confidence of my male peers to go, ‘I’m not gonna do that.’ That’s a revelation as you get older. I can listen to my mind and body. Like, ‘I actually don’t like doing that.’”
Starstruck asked big questions about the types of love that can enrich our lives. In the third series, Matafeo’s character Jessie is still navigating a relationship with her ex while friends are having children and getting married, and she realises others expect the same for her. The existential issues facing Jessie are “now coming true” for Matafeo, she says. “When marriage or having kids, those milestones of adulthood, are things you don’t want, it’s harder to be like, ‘I got this.’”
Matafeo says that, like Jessie, she doesn’t want kids – not now, probably not ever. She usually avoids reading reviews but was alerted to one fringe item in which a male critic suggested she’ll change her mind. “I was howling. ‘You did not listen to anything I said!’”
Society has so far to go on this, she says. It shouldn’t be remarkable for a woman to eschew parenthood, but it is a personal choice that still feels political. “You’re constantly having to defend your position. It’s hard because I’m so excited for my friends who have started to have kids, but you are pitted against each other.”
While she doesn’t think that male critic was correct, she is anxious for the future. “Many people don’t live in communities where they’re taken care of as elderly people, so I’m going to get rich enough to get an AI carer and live in a commune of like-minded older people.”
She is adamant that nothing she, or any comedian, says on stage should be taken as wisdom though. “This is just me at this moment. It’s a snapshot,” she says. “In the live show, there are more questions than answers. What is next? Really, I have no idea.”
Last year, Matafeo “got a lot of shit” for saying she regrets making a romcom. But it came from “intense self-reflection about what romance is”, she says. “Every other type of love is as important, if not more important. You start to realise: you can be romantic about everything. It’s a state of mind.”
It’s easier for musicians, she says, who can make album after album about heartbreak. “When you’re exploring those things in standup, there’s no backing track. It feels much more real and vulnerable and quite pathetic. But it’s one of the massive themes of life that every form of art comes back to.”
She is braced for controversy again – Taylor Swift is the subject of some very funny, very cutting jokes in On and On and On. Does Matafeo fear the singer’s notorious fandom? “God yeah, 100 per cent. I will be hunted down for saying this,” she says. “But I cannot be scared to speak my truth.”
Matafeo grew up in Auckland. Her Samoan dad and Scottish-Croatian mum were creative and encouraging, taking her to “galleries and libraries, every free thing we could do”. Aged 11 she auditioned for a kids’ show called Sticky TV, and was recruited to be one of a number of mini agony aunts and uncles. “It was bad advice,” she says. “But it was fun, and I became very comfortable in front of the camera.”
Two decades later, Matafeo is returning to children’s television. She is the new host of Junior Taskmaster, a spin-off of Channel 4’s comedy gameshow. Matafeo takes on the Greg Davies role, sitting in judgment of the young contestants, with Mike Wozniak as her sidekick. “We’re the kooky auntie and uncle to these children,” she says. “But I’ve got more of a teacher vibe than I thought I would.”
The tasks are just as tough as in the original show: “Adults would struggle. I loved watching what they did.” After Sticky TV, she can empathise with the junior contestants. “Those live recordings are so scary. But they really opened up.” So much so that Matafeo received a fair bit of banter from her young colleagues. “Some of them would try and shake me down for points side of stage.”
I suggest Matafeo has had the dream career trajectory, from kids’ TV to standup star to writer-director. “When you put it that way, yeah, I’ve been so lucky. Directing on Starstruck and writing stuff: when I was 11, that’s what I wanted to do. It’s been amazing to have picked up all this other stuff along the way,” she says. “The difficulty becomes: where do I want to spend my time and energy?”
She has said in the past that she fears an empty schedule. With so many creative doors ajar, she is ready to stop and think about what to do next. As she told us in Horndog, she gives 100 per cent to the stuff she cares about. “When you’re younger, you’re like, ‘I’m going to win an Oscar!’ Now it becomes much more about trying to build a day-to-day life where I feel good, I feel fulfilled,” she says. “Do as much good as you can, and maybe have a lovely cake from time to time.”
• On and On and On is at the Arcola theatre, London, until 19 October; then at the Britten theatre, London, on 26 October. Junior Taskmaster begins on Channel 4 in November
