The comedian and actor Rose Matafeo was once kicked off a fan forum for rock band Franz Ferdinand because she said she was going to marry frontman Alex Kapranos. She once appeared in a high school production of Grease where all the male roles were played by 28-year-olds. And when her cat, Burt Bachacat, went missing in 2013, she put up posters offering 100 hotdogs as a reward. In her stand-up material, Matafeo excavates the mortifying minutiae of her friendships, her adolescence, and her period-tracking app. But, she tells me, it’s far more common for her to be mistaken for a political comic – “being the person who I am, which is a brown woman in the world”. She sighs. “It’s bizarre when you just literally talk about being a woman, and people are like, ‘Wow, it’s really cool you talk about feminism.” The 31-year-old’s head moves so vigorously that her curls bounce. “I love feminism and I love being a feminist, but I’m not even getting into the hardcore s***!”
Born in New Zealand to a Samoan father and a Scottish-Croatian mother, Matafeo has marked her place on the British comedy circuit with this trademark mix of energy and honesty. The same candour that won her the Edinburgh Comedy Award with her 2018 show Horndog – making her, somewhat depressingly, the first person of colour and the fifth woman to win in its 42-year history – permeates over Zoom. Dressed in a black T-shirt, she is enthusiastic and thoughtful, and prone to interrupting herself to go off on tangents. It’s a trait only exacerbated when she realises midway through our conversation that she’s lost her laptop charger. We continue our chat as Matafeo bounces from room to room, scrambling through bags and checking plugs all while clutching the computer below her chin. “I’m so sorry you’re watching all this happen,” she says. In the end, she gives up and collapses onto her sofa. She probably has enough charge left.
