She Made a Perfect Rom-Com—Then Got ‘Disillusioned’ With Love

Rose Matafeo was almost finished making the final season of her exceptional rom-com series Starstruck when she started to seriously question the show’s essential premise. The experience of going through a breakup while trying to find a satisfying ending for the love story at the center of her show has now inspired her latest stand-up special, On and On and On, streaming on Max.

In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Matafeo discusses what it was like to move away from the genre that has defined much of her career into something a bit darker and more nuanced on stage. The 32-year-old New Zealander comedian also reveals the high-concept show she almost made instead of Starstruck, whether she can imagine returning to the show’s central characters of Jessie and Tom in the future, and why she decided to cut jokes at the expense of Taylor Swift fans from her new hour.

When Matafeo made her stand-up debut on American television on a 2019 episode of Conan, she opened her set with a self-deprecating joke about looking like “a character in a romantic comedy who’s only there to provide exposition to the plot” and then not appear again until a large group scene at the end of the film.

Less than two years later, she had cast herself as the rom-com protagonist in Starstruck, which premiered on BBC and HBO in 2021 and found her character Jessie having a one-night stand with a (fictional) movie star named Tom played by Nikesh Patel. Over the course of the show’s three seasons, the pair would fall in love, break up, reunite, and ultimately try to move on from each other for good. By the end of that process in 2023, she was publicly expressing a “massive sense of guilt” over playing into traditional rom-com tropes.

“My feelings of ‘regret’ about making a rom-com were born from the vibe of the third series, which was almost a comment on that,” Matafeo explains now of the show’s final season. “I’m torn, because I truly respect the genre, and so many things exist within it. But then, after two seasons of relentlessly promoting a rom-com, you’re going to get slightly disillusioned with it.”

It didn’t help that she was going through a breakup while editing the final season. “I’m only human,” she jokes, before clarifying, “I don’t regret making anything I made, and I’m so proud of the whole show.” Matafeo tried to work some of her larger ideas about how love “actually operates” and how it’s “incredibly complicated and nuanced and changes over time” into that third season, but was also “really nervous” about alienating fans.

“I think some people really liked that and some people really didn’t like that,” she says of the ambiguity that pervaded the final season. “There’s an ownership over that genre, and if you’re operating within it, then you have to follow certain rules.”

Matafeo felt an intense “pressure” not to “ruin a good thing that meant a lot to some people.” In the end she felt great about how the show ended because she was able to “beyond the premise to say something completely different.” Spoiler alert: There is no fairytale ending for the show’s two main characters—but there is a sense of closure.

By the time she got to writing her new special, Matafeo was ready to go to an even darker place. “I was writing early material for the show in an edit suite, watching myself be dumped while going through the aftermath of being dumped, which was a really interesting, intense experience,” she reveals.

When she would go try out material at night, it ended up being much more cynical because of what she was going through. “I was definitely quite down on love,” Matafeo says, and “a bit more skeptical” in general about the idea of finding love as something to strive for.

“You get to a certain age, and you go through enough of those relationships ending, and the first time your heart gets broken, you’re like, ‘Oh my god, no one’s ever felt this way before! I’m the first person ever to go through heartbreak, I should tell everyone!’” she says. “And then it happens again, and it happens again, and it happens again. And then by a certain point you go, ‘OK, I’ve been here before. I know this landscape, and I know how I deal with these things.’ And I think it was probably the first time I’d noticed that I do the same stuff, and I’m a creature of habit, and you actually can’t escape that. And you have to just be nice to yourself and hope it doesn’t happen again soon.”

One moment from the new special that sums up this feeling of expectation around love comes near the end of the hour, after she has delivered joke after joke about her disillusionment. She pauses for effect before turning to the crowd and announcing, “So, I’m engaged!” The audience reflexively applauds, before she stops them in their tracks to clarify that she is fully joking.

That huge reaction happened “every time” she tried the line on stage. “It’s the boy who cried wolf,” she says. “Now I’ll never be able to actually get engaged.”

“It’s fun, because it’s a moment where you feel quite connected to the audience,” Matafeo says. “Like, what have we learned here, guys? How is it that I could be talking for an hour about how difficult it is to be in relationships, how awful it is when they end, and in the moment you say, ‘But I’m actually engaged,’ they’re like ‘Yay! Happy ending!’”

Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.