Michele Hewitson interview: Rose Matafeo

Rose Matafeo, 23, likes to worry about everything despite having nothing to worry about. Her father is Samoan but she has never been to Samoa, although she likes the food. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Comedian who is the girly component on Jono and Ben doesn’t like to stand out but is quite happy to stop and admire her picture on billboards.

On the way to see the comedian Rose Matafeo I saw her from the bus - on an enormous billboard. The billboard is for the Jono and Ben show of which she is the girly component, which is not to be confused with being the nice component. Jono and Ben, she would tell me later, are much nicer than her which, she would have you believe, is not saying much. But, having now met all three of them, I believe her. For one thing, they just about hugged me to death and she doesn't do hugging. She said that Jono and Ben have never tried to hug her so they obviously know her pretty well. On parting we agreed to shake hands.

On the billboard she is wearing a very swish red sequinned frock and bright red lipstick and quite a lot of cleavage. She looks impossibly glamorous and a little intimidating - you certainly wouldn't dare to try hugging her - and not altogether real.

This is rather the point. She plays characters and this one is a character from old Hollywood (one of her obsessions; she has a fair few.) She arrived at the interview wearing jeans and a checked shirt, which looked like something she'd pinched from one of her brothers' closets, when he was 10. She well might have. She once went to one of those swanky dos people who are on the telly get invited to wearing a jumper she'd picked up from the children's department at The Warehouse. I don't know what she wore on her feet, but the day I saw her she was wearing enormous white sneakers. She said: "I wear sneakers all the time. Well, I can't fit any girls' shoes. I've got big feet." We looked at her feet which are big; they are size 10. "Look, I'm Samoan, right?"

She said, about the billboard: "Can I tell you something hilarious?"

Please do, I said, eagerly, because in my experience comedians never tell you anything hilarious in interviews. It is that: "Those feet are photoshopped! They're black because I wore bright pink shoes because that's all they had, and they said: 'We'll just photoshop it.' This has happened to me not once but twice with another promo shoot and it's the weirdest thing - seeing yourself with someone else's feet! It's f***ed up! It's so weird!" The cleavage is all hers. She pretended to be mightily miffed that I'd asked whether any photoshopping had taken place in that department. "Those bad boys are all my own! Those bad boys are actually real." I may have been looking slightly sceptical. "Pushed up to high heaven ... There you go."

Anyway, she looks beautiful and if I looked like that on a billboard I'd look at it, surreptitiously, at any opportunity. "I'm not surreptitious about it at all! I'll stare at it. Sometimes people will find me staring at a picture of myself. I'll appreciate it while I can."

She is only 23. I told her that Nora Ephron line about regretting not having worn a bikini at any opportunity when she was young (actually she said that she regretted not having worn a bikini for the entire year she was 26) and she said "yeah, but she was gorgeous up until she died, wasn't she?"

We were talking about this (or I was) because, like many people in the public eye she has both the desire for attention and shies away from being looked at - hence, perhaps, the wearing of the kid's jumper to a swanky do, which says "don't look at me" and is so kooky a wardrobe choice that it would guarantee that everyone looked. "I get so uncomfortable in those situations. I like dressing up when I can ... but it's like when someone does my make-up or my hair and I feel uncomfortable or I'm wearing something weird, I just feel like it's not the best representation of myself." So she posts pictures of herself on her Twitter account. "I like silly photos of me, looking stupid."

Rose Matafeo thinks of a really good tweet. Photo / Doug Sherring

She is an avid user of social media who is fairly anti-social. "Yeah, I am. I think I've just realised in the last year that I might be an introvert, ha, ha, because I took a test online. I'm like: 'I'm sure I'm an extrovert'. Then I read all this stuff about: 'When you go out with people and you're talking to people, do you get energy from them or do you feel your energy is being sapped?' And I feel like my energy is being sapped."

I think she just wants to think she's an introvert because then she can worry about being an introvert. She does rather invent things to worry about - which is not to say she doesn't end up really worrying about them. She knows she has nothing to worry about, so she worries about having nothing to worry about. She has two lovely parents (who are Rastafarians and way cooler than her which might be a worry) and two lovely older brothers and a thriving career and she's in love with her English comedian boyfriend, James Acaster, and good friends with her ex-boyfriend, Guy Williams, who she works with on Jono and Ben, and she loves her cat, Burt Bachacat, which is a terrible name for a cat. "That is not terrible. It is named after one of the greatest songwriters of our century." You really don't want to get into an argument with her, about anything. She said she'd never been to Samoa (her dad's Samoan) and she gets sick of people saying: "Oh, you have to go to Samoa." I said, yeah, why go? The food would be awful and she said, very sternly, that she loves Samoan food and: "Michele, you're being racist right now". She loves food and spends "all my money on food" and is addicted to food shows on TV but she can't cook because she has troubles with "cooking time management" but also with the stress of it all. She once served somebody an over-cooked steak and cried. "I get so emotional."

She doesn't mind baking because it has strict rules and measurements. She doesn't like a pinch of this and a gloop of that approach that is cooking. "I don't like that. I want some guidelines." She is a control freak, which is what she likes about stand-up comedy because she writes it, directs it, performs it and if it fails, it's her fault and if it succeeds, then all the sweeter.

Her new show for the NZ International Comedy Festival is called Rose Matafeo - Finally Dead (from tonight until May 2, at The Basement) and in it she stages her own funeral. What a funny idea. "People say, 'that's a great idea' and I say, 'I'm fully doing this because for a whole year I've had a really over-whelming surge of anxiety around dying.'" But why? She's 23! "I try and figure out why. I think it's a combination of stress and I'm at an age where a lot of things are changing. And I think it's almost - ha, ha, it sounds so cheesy to say - that you're at a kind of crossroads of what to do. To move [to England to be with the boyfriend and have a go at comedy there] or to stay. To do this job or not do this job and that freaks me out. Also, because I've got a very blessed life and the only thing I could possibly stress about is dying!"

Rose Matafeo stages her own funeral in 'Rose Matafeo - Finally Dead', until May 2, at The Basement.

So she really does manufacture things to worry about. "Totally. And I get a bit anxious, so I think that's the place I just put it. I'm allowed to feel like that, right? You can't take that away from me!"

A bit anxious! She frets about everything and she must have been a funny, fretting little girl. She wanted to be a little white girl because she was the only brown girl at her primary school and she had funny, frizzy Samoan hair and was always Scary Spice when she and her friends played at being Spice Girls. I looked suspiciously at her hair which is dead straight and not a bit frizzy. She gets it chemically straightened and has done since she was 18 and started being on the TV. We had a ridiculous disagreement about curly hair. "Your curly hair is lovely," she said. "No, it's not," I said. "No, no, no. Yours is the curly hair I'd want. My hair is thick and frizzy. I'm not going to look like Lorde if I grow my hair out. I'm going to look like Weird Al Yankovic." Her mum, who is white - and about to move to Uganda; "My mother just wants to be African" - was terribly upset when the curls vanished. "She was mortified! Because she loved my curly hair."

And of course she worries that: 'I feel like I'm bowing to a culture that doesn't like curly hair and it totally is a cultural thing and those attitudes towards frizzy hair are f***ed and definitely impacted my decision to do it. So I feel like a bad person for bowing to pressure. But then I'm also like f*** it."

She's a control freak and a world class worrier and a bad person. She says she really is an awful person and that on a stage she is a much nicer person than she is off one. She is so nice on stage that she says people, mostly girls, come up to her after gigs and say: "'You seem just like one of my best friends. Like we could get on in real life.' And I never seek out new friendships and I'm really nervous about meeting new people and I'm really quiet but for some reason I seem nicer on stage."

She says she thinks it's "good, a healthy thing for for a performer to have a bit of difference between what they are on and off stage otherwise it gets too confusing". She seemed good company off stage to me but she said that she's "a shit person to hang around with". "I'm a bit miserable sometimes. I'm quite down a lot of the time. I just think about things too much and I worry a lot and that gets tiring, even for me, being around me."

The one thing I am not allowed to say about her, having said it three times, according to her, is that she's neurotic. This is much worse than being miserable and a worrywart and an awful person because it would make her sound like a Jewish man.

She said: "I almost get sad about things that haven't actually happened!" All right, clearly not neurotic then. But has she ever seen a therapist? I was joking, really, because the idea of a not-neurotic young comedian with a blessed life and successful career seeing a therapist seems a bit odd. Of course she's seeing a therapist. She sees a cognitive behaviour therapist because she drives herself nutty over-thinking everything and "I let my emotions get the better of me and to step back and go: 'Oh. This is why I feel this way.'"

I wish the therapist luck. But not too much. I like her just the way she is, funny and formidable - imagine what she'll be like when she's 40.