Rose Matafeo says male comedians should be banned from doing #MeToo material

"What I’m sick of is men feeling like they need to tackle the subject"

Starstruck creator Rose Matafeo has said that she wants a blanket ban on male comedians tackling #MeToo in their material.

In a recent interview, the New Zealand stand-up spoke out against her male counterparts. “Ultimately, you are still financially benefiting from discussing the thing that you are part of the problem,” she told The Evening Standard. “I’m sick of seeing sensitive men being like, ‘What can we do? What can we DO? Apart from write an hour show about it… what can we DO?’”

29-year-old Matafeo was the first woman of colour to win the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2018 for her stand-up special Horndog. The special launched on iPlayer this year, after which Matafeo played her first movie lead in Taika Waititi-produced romantic comedy Baby Done. In Starstruck – which the actress wrote and created as well as acted in opposite Nikesh Patel – she stars as a party-loving millennial who has a one night stand with a famous actor.

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The six-part series dropped on BBC iPlayer on April 25 and has already drawn some comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Although it has a predominantly female cast, Matafeo still believes that gender disparity is a big issue in comedy.

“There will never be true equality in the representation of women in comedy until I can openly talk shit about a female comedian being bad,” she said in the interview. “Because there are just too few of us to let the team down like that.”

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