Rose Matafeo, creator and star of HBO Max's Starstruck, on her love of Bridget Jones‘s Diary and why she wants to break the rom com mold.
What did Rose Matafeo know, and when did she know it?
“Oh, my fucking God. When it got released in the U.K., I was like, ‘We have to cut that,’” she recalls, somewhat amazed. “I tried to choose the most innocuous, bland, beige fucking actor [for the joke]. It’s so funny that it proved the point:Over the course of the series, we watch as Matafeo’s hapless Jessie tries to decide whether she will or won’t with Patel’s über-famous Tom. “is my slight obsession with love and romance,” says Matafeo.
What’s also refreshing about Jessie and Tom is their chemistry—the most crucial element in every romantic comedy. Matafeo says it took “a very long casting process” to find someone who could pull off Tom’s charm and humor without “being a dick.” The hardest part, according to Matafeo, was landing on “a guy you genuinely believed found a woman funny.
Creating the character she was meant to fall in love with onscreen made Matafeo feel a little, well, odd. “Writing your own love interest is fucking weird,” she says wryly. “You feel like this weird puppet master. You feel like you’re writing your own fanfic.” But the genre’s history helped soothe her misgivings. “I’m dressing this man up in the things I think are attractive, and he says something attractive to me, which is so weirdly uncomfortable.