Let us begin with a summary of Madeleine Sami’s flurry of new shows in the form of a quiz.
Deadloch is a murder whodunnit set in Tasmania where she’s the tough out-of-town detective helping the local constabulary.
Double Parked is a local show about a lesbian couple trying to start a family via IVF who succeed beyond their wildest dreams.
Which one did she help write? Which one did she also direct? Which one is the comedy?
In order, Deadloch, Double Parked, and – sorry, trick question – both.
Yes, despite a grim story set in a bleak, misty landscape, Deadloch is a very funny show. That’s helped by Sami’s outlandish performance as Eddie Redcliffe, a cocky detective flown in from Darwin with an Aussie accent as wide as Bass Strait.
She’s there to help local senior sergeant Dulcie (Kate Box from Wentworth and Rake) after a body is found on the beach just as the local arts festival is getting under way.
And yes, just when Aussie-based Kiwis have won more rights across the Tasman, along comes Sami in a merciless piece of Ocker-mockery.
“Or have I destroyed every chance?” Sami wonders aloud after the Listener suggests her Eddie performance might enhance any future citizenship application.
Today, Sami is in Auckland in the home she shares with pop-star wife Ladyhawke/Pip Brown, a substantial number of guitars belonging to both, and their 5-year-old daughter. Sami is due back in the editing suite for Double Parked, a show she shot after Deadloch over Auckland’s alleged summer.
She was meant only to direct, but after reading the pilot script by Chris Parker and Alice Snedden, “I was like, ‘I have to act as well.’” She plays PE teacher Nat, one half of a couple with Antonia Prebble’s Steph, whose IVF efforts have been in vain … until a plan B brings about an overly positive result.
“Running around Auckland being pregnant in the summer isn’t a lot of fun,” she says about strapping on the prosthetic baby bump. Even before any character’s waters had broken, it seemed the weather was getting in ahead.
“It was like end times with all these bloody cyclones and floods happening … ‘Okay, we’re going to have a late start today because the location is flooded.’ But there was a good spirit. It’s going to be a good show.”
The ever-versatile performer started her parallel directing career on the 2016-18 series Funny Girls. This also featured Parker and Snedden, the co-writer of BBC sitcom Starstruck with Kiwi comedian and actor Rose Matafeo, as well as Jackie van Beek, Sami’s co-everything on their hit feature comedy The Breaker Upperers.
If there’s an Australian equivalent to Team Sami-van Beek – they have another movie in the works and are aiming for a trilogy – it’s Deadloch creators Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan.
The comedy pair made their name with The Katering Show, a send-up of cooking shows and all things foodie, then Get Krack!n, a send-up of breakfast television, which they hosted. It ended its second and final season on the ABC with a provocative headline-making twist in which Aboriginal “emergency hosts” Miranda Tapsell and Nakkiah Lui threw aside the chat-show niceties to address the treatment of indigenous people.
The Kates first recruited Sami as one of the Deadloch writing team – van Beek was unavailable – and eventually gave her the role of brash Eddie. That’s despite her not trying very hard at the audition. She’d thought the more serious role of Dulcie, for which she was shortlisted, was more her.
“I was like, ‘Oh, Eddie is kind of fun, but maybe I want to do the meatier queer dramatic role of Dulcie.’ So I didn’t put any effort into the Eddie audition.”
The Kates saw it differently. Sami was soon off to Tasmania for the five-and-a-half-month shoot. The resulting eight-episode series may be a send-up of Scandi-noir-influenced crime dramas, but it’s doing that with Amazon Prime video money, so it looks like the real thing.
Sami hasn’t worked on anything this big since having a small role as a cop in Jane Campion’s TV mystery drama Top of the Lake, a series you suspect might have had an influence on Deadloch.
“Tassie’s landscape lends itself so well to the genre, New Zealand’s does, too, but Tassie is more arid and sparse. With Top of the Lake, it’s like the Hollywood version of noir, and Tassie is this kind of bogan version, which is cool. It gives the show a real vibe.”
Woven through Deadloch’s black comedy, satire and social commentary is also a decent mystery thriller, the physical exertions of which have left Sami with a full bathroom cupboard. “I have so many creams left over from all the bruising.”
Playing the mouthy Eddie was exhausting in other ways.
“I’ve never played anyone who is as aggressive and highly strung and stressed out. Some days, you’ve been that character longer than you’ve been yourself.”
She laughs about having a dinner mid-shoot where one of the show’s directors turned to her with a puzzled look, having noticed Sami’s normal Kiwi accent for the first time.
The work she put in reminded her of her early career when she was first displaying a chameleonic gift for characterisation in the likes of Toa Fraser’s plays Bare and No.2 or her multiple-personality comedy show Super City.
So, just when she was easing herself into a role behind the camera, Deadloch rekindled her acting bug. She’ll also be in the second season of the Taika Waititi-Rhys Darby HBO pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death.
“So, I am going to be everywhere, and I want to apologise to the people of New Zealand … I’m sorry, I fell in love with acting again.”
As her first foray into Australia, Deadloch, she thinks, may open her up to more work across the Tasman. It’s a welcome prospect after having spent five years in Los Angeles.
“With the way the world is, and my daughter’s five, and it’s not too far and they’re doing cool stuff there. Obviously, telling New Zealand stories has always been what keeps me going.
“I just like to be working. I still have that mentality of the little theatre kid who is just happy to have a job. If I get a job, I’m so stoked.”
Deadloch is streaming now on Amazon Prime. Double Parked is on Three, Thursday, June 15, 8.30pm, and ThreeNow.
