Rose Matafeo is unhealthy at ending issues.
That is just about the very first thing she tells her viewers in her new stand-up particular, “On and On and On,” premiering Thursday on Max. It’s additionally a becoming drawback for the New Zealand-born, London-based comic who gained U.S. consideration for creating and starring in the romantic comedy “Starstruck,” the Max collection she co-wrote with comic Alice Snedden.
Matafeo was so affable the time she appeared on the British comedy panel competitors present “Taskmaster” that regardless that she didn’t win the season, she did win over a number of followers with a folks music she wrote in report time about collection creator Alex Horne. With strains like “We’ll get five guys and gals to play your game / Who will all be of varying levels of fame,” “Taskmaster Country Rap” is such an ideal earworm that it has even gotten caught in Matafeo’s personal head (“it was an achievement, but it also drove me to madness,” she says, laughing.).
She’s additionally caught round for one more take at that franchise. With Mike Wozniak, Matafeo at the moment oversees “Junior Taskmaster,” the place she judges precocious childrens’ skills to finish equally zany challenges.
However even when Matafeo is unhealthy at letting issues go, she’s fairly nice at getting them began. The opening for “On and On and On” features a choreographed dance routine earlier than she delves right into a relatable bit concerning the favourite utility of checklist-loving mother and father and disgraced celebrities all over the place: Apple’s Notes. And the day of our Zoom chat, she’s vivid eyed and fortunately consuming a bowl of Particular Okay — the morning after she appeared in a sold-out efficiency of her new particular at Frogtown’s Elysian Theater.
A number of that is outdated hat for Matafeo. Now 32, she obtained her begin doing comedy workshops at 15 and has been doing stand-up for greater than half her life; a undeniable fact that she says makes her really feel “a panic slightly rising in my chest.” She talks onstage about relatability and the necessity for, particularly feminine comics, to be self-deprecating. However she says now that this doesn’t come from a spot of impostor syndrome.
“That’s the one thing I don’t think I have,” she says of the sensation of not deserving success. “I have everything else: low self-esteem, terrible relationship with myself, all these things you’re supposed to have in your 30s.”
She explains that “particularly being on stage, or being in front of people or having a certain audience, that entitlement I think is bizarre and strange and not really helpful to me. So I think that kind of goes hand in hand with impostor syndrome of going, ‘I deserve this.’”
The brand new particular is completely different from “Starstruck,” a TV present that chronicles the work, existence and, sure, fame that get in the best way of two individuals’s happiness. Its finale on the finish of Season 3 finds every of them transferring on to another person whereas additionally individually acknowledging that it’s inconceivable to fully minimize the emotional tie that pulls them again to the familiarity and luxury of their relationship. Matafeo compares it to the ending of director Michel Gondry and author Charlie Kaufman’s indirect romantic drama “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” When she was youthful, Matafeo believed that Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet’s dysfunctional paramours obtained again collectively on the finish. Now, she’s satisfied that they undoubtedly didn’t.
In “On and On and On,” we test in with Matafeo after a real-life breakup the place everybody from her grandmother to her housekeeper is like “girl, move on. You weren’t together long enough to be this upset.” She talks about obsessively chronicling her emotions within the aforementioned Notes app and the surreal expertise of abruptly understanding her mother and father higher as a result of she’s now the age they have been when she was a child. Although these bits are nonetheless within the reside performances, she minimize jokes about Taylor Swift and Michael Jackson from the particular attributable to time (i.e., who has the time to get doxxed on-line by superfans?). However a joke concerning the hipster attractiveness of villain Waluigi from the “Mario Kart” sport, clearly written and recorded earlier than the real-world arrest of Luigi Mangione in reference to the capturing dying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is staying in.
Most strikingly to a sure subset of the inhabitants, “On and On and On” follows within the custom of her 2020 Max particular “Horndog,” during which Matafeo makes jokes about obsessively chronicling her interval whereas carrying white bottoms. Simply because she’s older doesn’t imply she’s essentially wiser.
“In your 20s, you kind of almost think you’ve got it together and now I’m starting this next bit where you’re like, ‘Yeah, you do know nothing,’ and you kind of have to accept the random s— of life” the place mates marry and have children and the era above you will get sick and dies, she explains.
Matafeo says she’s all the time had an curiosity in dying; the primary present she carried out on the Edinburgh Fringe Competition was about her personal funeral and concerned her leaping out of a coffin in a bejeweled tuxedo.
“I think anyone who’s a little nervous, a little prone to anxiety at times, knows that it’s actually about control,” she explains. “And there’s so much we can’t control. What I think about the show is [that it’s my] learning to accept that there are things we can’t control and that that’s fine.”
“On and On and On” additionally continues to have a good time Matafeo’s deep love of cinema each outdated and new, revered and never a lot. This time, she references the profession of the late actor Shelley Winters and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s whimsy French rom-com “Amélie.”
“I think any of the film references made in my show are for the people who remember going to a physical shop to rent videos and DVDs,” she says. “I think so much of that [experience] was the covers of things that live in your brain forever … the poster of ‘Amélie’ was up in every teenage girl’s bedroom in 2007.”
She’s talked in previous interviews about her appreciation for so-called “guilty pleasures” like Channing Tatum’s ab-tastic “Magic Mike XXL” and the Kirsten Dunst cheerleader masterpiece “Bring It On.” And “Starstruck” is loaded with references on every little thing from “The Graduate” to “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
”I feel I’m very simplistic, possibly to my detriment, however when you may describe the plot to a movie, to me that may be a good movie,” she explains of her standards, including that “with rom-coms … the simplicity in a lot of them is what makes them quite classic and timeless. ‘When Harry Met Sally’ is a very simple concept … with any genre, there’s good and bad to it, every single one. But [rom-coms] are unfairly maligned because, obviously, mostly women are the people who like it.”
But when there may be one rom-com that Matafeo can’t get on board with, it’s the upcoming “Bridget Jones” film follow-up “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.”
This isn’t as a result of the franchise appears to have (controversially) killed off Colin Firth’s Mark Darcy, a curmudgeon who nonetheless liked our lady simply as she was.
It’s as a result of Matafeo wasn’t requested to be in it.
“I haven’t even watched the trailer because I’m so upset that nary a self-tape request has come through the f— door,” she says. “Have I not done enough to promote ‘Bridget Jones’ as canon? And not one whisper.”
