Madeleine Sami
Madeleine Sami is an actor, born 1980.
Madeleine Sami started in theatre in Auckland and has been building her own material ever since, which is the through-line of a career that otherwise looks scattered. She created, co-wrote and starred in the sketch series Super City, playing a set of different characters, and she co-wrote, co-directed and co-starred in The Breaker Upperers with Jackie van Beek, a comedy about two women running a business that breaks up other people's relationships.
New Zealand film has used her steadily in small, precisely judged parts: Morana in What We Do in the Shadows, a customer in Eagle vs Shark, Constable Wood in Under the Mountain, one of the Beat It gang in Boy, Marimacho in Slow West, Gladys in Come to Daddy. Watch a few of them together and the pattern is clear. She can arrive in a scene with a fully formed comic person and leave before the film has to explain her.
The lead she was waiting for is Eddie Redcliffe in Deadloch, a detective imported into a small-town investigation as pure chaos. It is a big, loud, profane performance inside a series that is otherwise extremely controlled, and the friction between the two is where the comedy comes from. She has also played Archie in Our Flag Means Death, co-hosted The Great Kiwi Bake Off, and remains a fixture of the New Zealand comedy circuit, including Taskmaster NZ and 7 Days.
Movies (11)
TV (5)
Where to start with Madeleine Sami
Deadloch is the reason to be here. Sami's Eddie is one of the best comic performances Australasian television has produced this decade, and the series hands her a straight partner precise enough to break against. Start there, and do not judge it on the first episode, which is the weakest.
The Breaker Upperers is the film she made herself, and the fairest test of her writing as well as her acting. What We Do in the Shadows and Boy are the New Zealand comedy canon she is a small part of. Our Flag Means Death is where many newer viewers found her. For the odd corners, Come to Daddy is genuinely nasty and she is very funny in it, and Slow West proves she can play it entirely straight.