She’s already appeared in not one but two British versions of the beloved comedy game show, but the UK-based Kiwi comedian says returning to Aotearoa for the new season of Taskmaster NZ was a true career highlight.
When the new season of Taskmaster NZ premieres tonight, Rose Matafeo will become the only person in the entire world to appear in not one, not two, but three different versions of the popular comedy game show. “I need to diversify,” the award-winning comedian, writer and actor jokes from her home in the UK.
Matafeo first took part in the UK version of Taskmaster in 2019, where she competed alongside British comedy legends like Jo Brand and David Baddiel and became known for promoting the New Zealand fish poster, as well as for our unique pronunciation of “shed”. Five years later, she crossed the floor to sit on the Taskmaster’s golden throne, dishing out the points to the chatty kids of Taskmaster Junior. That should have been the end of Matafeo’s Taskmaster journey, as she’d never considered the possibility of competing on the homegrown spinoff Taskmaster NZ, which began in 2020.
It wasn’t until Matafeo returned to Aotearoa last year to film New Zealand Spy with close friend (and Taskmaster NZ assistant) Paul Williams that the opportunity to join the cast of the seventh series presented itself. Matafeo was keen to spend more time working at home, but it’s so unheard of for a former Taskmaster contestant to compete in a different country’s series that she had to text the show’s creator Alex Horne to check if she was even allowed to do it. “He was like, it’s fine, I don’t care,” remembers Matafeo. “He’s been on the record as saying he’d love to do Taskmaster NZ himself. I think he’d do it, but he just doesn’t have the time.”
With the Little Alex Horne seal of approval, Matafeo joined what she calls a “dream cast” of New Zealand actors and comedians for the seventh season. Alongside Dave Fane, Hoani Hotene, Morgana O’Reilly and Rhys Mathewson, Matafeo will undergo a series of pointless and perplexing tasks in the hope of winning points from Taskmaster Jeremy Wells. You might think that having extensive experience as both Taskmaster and contestant would give Matafeo an unfair advantage over her fellow competitors, but she’s not so sure.
“Maybe my enemies would say that,” she deadpans, before arguing that her prior Taskmaster experience actually worked against her. “I’m the heel, you know. I’m The Undertaker. I’m the bad guy in WWE.”
There’s always plenty to wrestle with on Taskmaster, but Matafeo found making the show at home a much different experience to filming her first British season. “When I did it here [in the UK], no one knew who I was,” she remembers, adding that she was far more nervous to film the West Auckland studio episodes than she was at Pinewood in 2019. “I was like ‘oh shit, people I know are in the crowd’.” Her nerves were eased by the fact she already knew many of Taskmaster NZ’s local crew, with friends like Josh Thomson and Chris Parker directing some of this season’s episodes.
Coming back to New Zealand also gave Matafeo a chance to work with some of her longtime comedy heroes. She’s known Mathewson since she was 15, when they met in teenage comedy training programme Class Comedians, and she reckons Fane is one of the funniest people on the planet (“He just keeps talking. He won’t stop until you stop him.”) Despite not knowing the “brilliant and amazing” O’Reilly or the “unbelievably witty” Hotene before filming, the five contestants quickly gelled to create the magical comedic chemistry Taskmasker is renowned for. “I feel sorry for all the other casts,” Matafeo says. “I think this is the best one.”
It also helped that Williams was there too, and the chance to spend five days filming back-to-back tasks together with her best friend was one of the main reasons Matafeo agreed to Taskmaster NZ. Matafeo says the familiarity of their relationship took the chaos to a new level. “There are moments where I am just genuinely losing it with him, and I can tell he’s losing it as well.” Matafeo was also thrilled to work with Fane and Wells, having spent her teenage years watching Fane in Tongan Ninja and listening to Wells every morning on bFM. Sitting beside them in the Auckland studio – while also wearing a Havoc and Newsboy T-shirt – made being part of Taskmaster NZ a true highlight of Matafeo’s illustrious career.
“I was so much more starstruck with the people I did this with than the UK version,” she says. “Maybe apart from Jo Brand. She’s pretty cool.”
Those memories of Matafeo’s first Taskmaster UK experience remain strong, and she came back to New Zealand determined not to repeat the mistakes of Taskmasters past. She thought a lot about her costume, a homage to Parker Posey’s character from 90s movie Dazed and Confused (one of Matafeo’s mother’s favourite films) that saw her carry two bottles of ketchup around the Taskmaster NZ house at all times. Out of empathy for fellow Taskmaster Wells, Matafeo wanted to bring a little less “competitive and annoying” energy to the New Zealand studio, and she also devised a foolproof strategy for approaching each task: read every instruction carefully. Above all, she vowed to never get flustered.
How did Matafeo’s cunning plan go? “I failed at every stage,” she admits. The wily Taskmaster wins again, no matter the hemisphere. “There’s moments in the studio where I’m watching the tasks and going, ‘How did I not learn?’ There’s so many of these little things that I missed, and it still kills me.”
But this unpredictable mix of pleasure and pain is exactly what Matafeo loves about Taskmaster. It’s impossible for comedians to keep up a persona on a show like this, she says, and the absurd nature and rapid in-the-moment nature of the tasks means everything comfortable and controllable is stripped away. Taskmaster has a knack for revealing a comedian’s true self, often in unexpected ways, and for a self-confessed control freak like Matafeo, it’s this authenticity that makes the show so special. “Taskmaster is definitely the most accurate portrayal of my personality – which I do not think is a good thing. I’m kind of scared.”
It’s not often that a television comedy show manages to transcend geographical and cultural boundaries and become a spinoff success in 16 different countries, but Taskmaster continues to delight audiences with its spontaneity and silliness. Matafeo reckons that success is all down to Horne, who created a unique format built on both rules and creativity. He also continues to care about the original spirit of Taskmaster, which Matafeo believes has carried over to the people making it in Aotearoa. “Paul [Williams] really cares about it, the team here really care about it. That’s a rare thing for a show that’s been sold to the world.”
After three glorious turns around the Taskmaster sun, what’s left on Matafeo’s Taskmaster bucket list? This has to be it, she insists, unless Horne picks up her stellar idea of making a Taskmaster Elderly and she can bust out a Christmas special in her dotage. Until then, Matafeo’s trying to manage a few last frazzled nerves about tonight’s premiere of Taskmaster NZ, worrying that she’s about to “ruin her reputation again” with another series of spectacular shambles, just like she did in the UK seven years ago.
“Let’s hope that I approached it with a little more maturity and slightly more wisdom,” she says of finally coming home to Taskmaster NZ. “But I really don’t think I did.”
Taskmaster NZ premieres tonight (Monday September 14 on TVNZ+ and TVNZ2).
