So when I saw she’d written the show, I was really excited. I was a Rose Matafeo fan because I knew her stand-up, and I’d been to her show with friends, and I thought she was brilliant. It does such a good job of portraying a total romantic fantasy in a way that isn’t romanticized. The Cut spoke to Patel about being a Rose Matafeo fanboy, representation, and whether he’d ever date a normie - sorry, civilian. Though he’s best known for his more romantic roles, Patel seeks roles and projects that change up the formula and push the industry forward, regardless of genre. He caused swoonage as Kash Khan, an unsatisfied investment banker–slash–wannabe actor who fell for the wrong woman in Mindy Kaling’s 2019 Hulu remake of Four Weddings and a Funeral, and was a leading man in the hit U.K. debut, or even his first time playing an actor. It’s not Patel’s first rom-com - or his U.S. It’s a total fantasy come true, but thanks to the excellent writing of creator Rose Matafeo and co-writer Alice Snedden, it doesn’t feel fantastical at all.Ĭentral to the show’s believability is Nikesh Patel’s endearingly neurotic portrayal of movie star Tom Kapoor. If Starstruck is anything to go on, the all-new, slightly smarter BBC Three is something I could get used to.Starstruck, the new BBC series streaming on HBO Max, has a plot straight out of fanfic: Girl meets boy, girl goes home with boy, girl discovers boy is an extremely famous actor but she doesn’t care because she’s cool, boy totally falls in love with her. Maybe this is what BBC Three needed all along, you know: a year away to sort its life out, move out of that houseshare where the door doesn’t really lock, stop doing ketamine on a school night, download a mindfulness app but never really use it. It’s this messy-20s-existential-prang that makes it a nice fit for the sleeker, more mature current guise of BBC Three – the difficult and moody second album to Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps’ raw and raucous debut. The show also deals with the end-of-20s panic attack of being alive – “Hey, why don’t I have that job, partner, house and solid sense of reality I was promised?” – more adroitly than a lot of other shows that have attempted to do ever since Girls happened. Starstruck has, at its core, the push-pull near-miss lovefest beats of a good romcom, pulled out over six episodes, but it’s done with an extra sheen of polish – Minnie Driver is in it for exactly one scene for some reason – and gemstone one-liners litter each episode (“He’s a famous actor, and you’re a little rat nobody”). She has a heartwarmingly strange housemate (Emma Sidi), an intense boss at one job (Sindhu Vee) and another intense boss at another job (Joe Barnes) to keep her in various states of check. The rough premise is Jessie has inadvertently slept with megastar actor Tom (Nikesh Patel), a frankly annoyingly handsome man, and now she has to try to balance her good personality, her terrible defence mechanisms and the looming dread of turning 29, all while dodging paparazzi and getting texts from someone she’s only saved on her phone as “Tom Famous’”. Here, the New Zealand comic plays Jessie, and it is likely that you have a Jessie or a Jessie-adjacent person in your life – always gets off the bus at the wrong stop, never has any charge left in their phone – and it’s fun to watch her bounce around, gig job to gig job, shag to shag, minor flatmate emergency to minor flatmate emergency. ![]() You know Matafeo already from “everything”, and so it stands to reason she would get a Matafeo-led and Matafeo-created sitcom to play with and really cement her Matafeoness on to the wider psyche. ![]() Good, then, that Rose Matafeo’s new series, Starstruck (Sunday, BBC Three), does not fall into that trap.
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