"No one needs to care whether I have children or not," says Rose Matafeo. Yet when the 33-year-old actor, director, writer and comic was tapped last year to host the child-sized spinoff of the U.K. competition show "Taskmaster," at least one member of the British press immediately made assumptions about her own maternal aspirations. After all, if a woman is working with children, surely she must feel a pull toward bearing and raising them.
As she explains in her new Max stand-up special "On and On and On," Matafeo does not, in fact, have an inner mother yearning to burst out of her. During our "Salon Talks" conversation, the creator and star of the cherished Max rom-com series "Starstruck" got serious as she discussed "that expectation that's bestowed upon you when you're born into a body that can have children" and the surrealness of living in a moment when "So many of these things are going backward in terms of actual rights, of being able to have access to birth care or abortion." As she says frankly, "That is so scary to me."
