Madeleine Sami. Photo / File.
Kiwi actress and director Madeleine Sami sits down with Steve Holloway and Seamus Marten from the Between Two Beers podcast to discuss her thriving career, loss, Kiwi comedy, Taika Waititi, Lucy Lawless and the end of her relationship with Ladyhawke.
Madeleine Sami feels like she has been through “a washing machine of work” in the first half of this year.
The 43-year-old, perhaps New Zealand’s most prolific creative comedic female, has been acting and directing in Double Parked - a TV comedy about two women in a same-sex relationship who each become pregnant - before going straight to directing two episodes of an Australian comedy, Gold Diggers, which re-imagines Australia’s gold rush.
She’s then returned home for promotional work for Double Parked and new Australian crime-comedy show Deadloch, in which she also wrote and acted.
And this week, speaking on the latest episode of the Between Two Beers podcast about her tendency to have five projects on the go at once, Sami revealed she was now “in a writing zone”, with a new feature film script also due in a month.
“I’m pretty jazzed about the thing I have to write at the moment,” she said. “It’s a sports film. I can’t tell you much more than that, but it’s exciting.”
And all this comes at a time when the public is only now belatedly consuming news of her relationship break-up a year ago with Pip Brown (LadyHawke).
On that subject Sami said she’s never been someone that wanted to talk about her personal life, but accepts it is something that goes with having such a profile and the pair both made statements on social media.
“I think back in the day used to be way worse, but the one positive thing I’ll say about Instagram and Twitter is that it’s put the power back into the hands of the people whose story it is.”
“She (Pip) called me and was like, ‘is this cool’. And I sent her what I was going to write and I was like, ‘is this cool?’ And we just made sure we were both happy with the message that we’re putting out.”
Sami said it didn’t feel great to be exposed and was “a vulnerable time for everyone” but was pleased they were able to choreograph things - even though this was done with reluctance.
“We both got to say what we wanted to say, so in our own way we both knew what was coming out.
“You might as well be the one saying it in your own words, as opposed to someone else just speculating....
“The great thing about that whole scenario is that the response in the comments and stuff for both of us have just been really loving and supportive. And so in a way, it’s been really nice, as well.”
Meanwhile Sami saw her “epically busy” year as another occupational hazard of the entertainment world.
“I think there’s this mentality that you get into when you start out in this industry,” she said. “And it’s really hard to break out of it. When you’re 20, it’s like, just take work, just take work, keep it going. Because also the thing about this industry is you never know what’s going to happen, when things are going to line up.
“So yeah, I do have a lot of projects... I think it’s possibly also undiagnosed ADHD. But yeah, it’s good to have a few things on the go.”
Sami described Deadloch, which is now streaming on Prime Video, as “a really thrilling suspenseful crime show that also has so much comedy in it - and then underneath that, all the layers of political commentary as well”.
It’s a black comedy in a fictional Tasmanian town which is left reeling when a resident turns up dead on the beach and two female detectives are thrown together to solve the case. Along with mystery and humour, Deadloch explores deeper issues around truth, gender and race.
Sami acknowledged it has been hard for some viewers though.
“It’s kind of a kind of a new genre, I guess... Some people are watching it because they’ve been told it’s a crime show, and then my character comes along, and they’re like, ‘What the f**k is going on here?’... and then some people are watching it for the comedy and the crime’s jarring for them.”
Sami has been at the hub of New Zealand’s comedy scene for decades, rising to prominence starring in the plays Bare, and No. 2, before writing and starring in her own comedy series, Super City, where she played five different characters and won best performance by an actress at the 2011 Aotearoa Film and Television Awards.
In 2018 she co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in The Breaker Upperers, a movie about two women who run an agency that helps break couples up, which was a box-office hit in New Zealand and remains one of the country’s top 20 grossing Kiwi films.
Sami and fellow Kiwi writer, director and actor Jackie van Beek had written The Breaker Upperers over a number of years - but then filmed it in just four weeks.
“We wanted to get someone like Taika [Waititi] or Jermaine [Clement] to direct it but they were both busy at the time. And they were both like, why don’t you just do it?
“And we’d both worked on What We Do in the Shadows and had kind of seen how they operate. So we said, ‘oh, yeah, okay’.
“We had a really good time, we got all of our most talented funny friends involved, we tried to give everyone in New Zealand a part. It was literally like, ‘Oscar, what are you doing tomorrow? Can you just come in? Like, we just need 15 minutes.”
The wider success of the film came as a surprise.
“We were just genuinely hoping that we’d get a New Zealand release and that New Zealanders would watch it.”
But the Kiwi humour struck a chord overseas as well, something Sami attributes to Waititi’s previous injection into Thor, and also the Flight of the Conchords.
“There’s this brand now of New Zealand comedy. And it’s dry, and I think one of the reviews was ‘awkward, dry comedy’. That’s our style and they were loving it.
“So then it took off after that and we got to open the Sydney Film Festival and we sold the film to Netflix.”
Sami admitted to having learned much from working with Waititi, whom she had known for a long time, and also directed her earlier Super City TV series as well as being executive producer of The Breaker Upperers.
“He just goes and goes that guy. You’re talking about me having projects on the go - that guy’s like me on acid. He’s never like, satisfied, Taika.
“He’s constantly making work, and he’s just really good at knowing what is funny, and he is very ‘live’ all the time. Like he’s always looking for ways to make things funnier, or better.
“When he directs, there’s a lot of improv involved... it’s like not being married to a script too much.
“Taika, when he directs, he often just yells out options at you, and he’ll crack you up, and you’ll crack him up.
“I think the experience of doing Super City with him was like just jamming with him on the dialogue sometimes and coming up with better options. And I think that’s what comedy is about.”
Sami shared a story about the life of stardom and how Waititi invited her and co-star Jackie van Beek to a party shortly after she arrived in Los Angeles when editing The Breaker Upperers.
“We’d just got off the plane we met when we met him for a beer,” Sami said. “And he’s like, ‘yeah, you want to come to a party?’
“I was literally in overalls that probably stunk like plane, no make-up. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll go to a house party or something’. And we end up at the Chateau Marmont, and it’s Seth MacFarlane’s 40th birthday...
“This is hilarious. Paris Hilton’s there and she’s like, ‘Hey, what do you guys do?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy. He’s like chatting to Leo DiCaprio. It’s nuts.”
Sami also has a great friendship with another Kiwi superstar, Lucy Lawless, with whom she had acted alongside in one episode of Xena: Warrior Princess and then performed The Vagina Monologues with as a teenager for the Auckland Theatre Company.
“I was pretty young, living in a flat in Mt Eden and I didn’t drive... She kindly offered to take me home every night from rehearsals and from the show every night.... And then we just became friends we just like bonded.
“She’s a girl from Mt Albert, that’s who Lucy is, and I grew up in Onehunga.
“Even though we’re obviously different ages and with very different experiences in life, essentially, that’s who she is. She’s one of the most smart down to earth people you’ll ever meet and we just became really close friends.
“She would sometimes come over to my flat, just sitting in my room and my cousins or my friends would be like, ‘Hi Xena’ - ‘Hi’. She’s just so chill with everyone.”
Meanwhile Sami doubted her quirky two-season Super City TV comedy series (2011-13), in which she transforms into a host of different Auckland-based characters, would ever get made these days.
“It was so dark and edgy, and heartbreaking and funny - but also just sad.,” she said. “I just feel like the landscape for TV changed a lot when reality television kind of came in and became a massive thing. I think people didn’t want to really invest in experimental interesting stuff, especially in New Zealand because it’s so hard to make money for the TV channels.”
In terms of comedy, Sami remains one of the great accent impersonators, dating back to the days when she was touring the “No. 2″ stage show, where she played nine characters from a 7-year-old to an old woman.
To do so at short notice so she quickly perfected a classic Enimem rap, but done in the style of Julie Andrews.
Here she eloquently breaks into “Hi, kids, do you like violence?... Wanna see me stick nine-inch nails, through each one of my eyelids...?
“It was just a really fast way of getting my mouth open so that I could get into playing these characters.”
While Sami never did drama school, she did do a lot of youth theatre and Auckland Theatresports work and described herself as “a nerd for acting from a really young age”.
And at home gatherings, talent quests were common, which cultivated a lot of impersonation skills.
“I’m one of 23 cousins. And I say to people, I’m not even the most talented, funniest, best person for entertaining in my family...
“But for some reason, it just kind of clicked for me. Our family growing up was always like we’d do shows, characters for each other. So that sort of set me up for doing that for other people out in the world.”
Today Sami still lives in Onehunga, where she feels she belongs.
“It felt like a really good place to grow up. Really, I’ve got a real fondness for it.
“It was so cool to grow up in that area, because there were a lot of kids like me. You know, there are a lot of kids that were like a mixture of like different lots of different races or so you felt at home amongst that, that group.”
As a “mixed suburb” it has also supplied a rich vein of character material.
“I feel like I was exposed to a lot of different races and different people from all walks of life. And I think, to be honest, I think, for someone like me who has always loved doing voices and characters and stuff, I was always around great characters.
“So it was, in a way, like, a playing field for that early stuff for me, like thinking of making up characters and jokes.”
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