She's graced our screens for years, but next month Madeleine Sami takes on the biggest acting role of her career to date in new Australian black comedy Deadloch.
Sami plays Eddie Redcliffe, a “rough and ready” Darwin cop brought in to investigate a murder in a sleepy Tasmanian town.
Madeleine Sami stars as Detective Eddie Redcliffe in Deadloch with actress Kate Box, right. Photo: Supplied
Sami, who is also a writer, director and musician, initially joined Deadloch to write an episode for the show’s creators, Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney.
“I came on board to write and worked on the script for six months, seven months or so, and then asked to audition, which I thought was a gag. I thought they were joking. And they weren't they're like, ‘no we mate we love your acting’.”
Eddie is a dream character, Sami says.
“To get to play this really brash woman has been just one of the joys of my life.
“Eddie’s kind of like a clown in a way and so I got to kind of draw on a lot of the skills that I have as an idiot.”
Sami, 43, grew up as part of a large family (I’ve got 23 cousins on my mum’s side, six sisters and a brother”) in Porirua, Wellington. She says that was the perfect training ground for a performer.
“We were all quite close growing up… we were poor. And so we entertained each other by doing stupid stuff. I think I quickly got that bug fairly early on that it made me feel good to make people laugh or to entertain people.
“There's a lot of singing and a lot of performing and a lot of clowns in my family. I just kind of came out of that world. I often say to people, ‘I'm not even the funniest or the most talented at acting in my family, I’m just the one that makes a living out of it’.”
Sami is well-known to New Zealand audiences thanks to various roles in theatre, TV and film, including Sione's Wedding, Eagle Versus Shark, What We Do in the Shadows and The Breaker Upperers. She says Eddie Redcliffe is “the biggest role I’ve ever played”.
“It just took this long to be seen as a lead I guess, because of by virtue of the fact that we have been in a world that hasn't been, as accepting of diversity, age-wise for women, skin colour, all that stuff.
“I feel like I'm in this point in my career where I'm actually working the most… it’s taken time for the world to catch up to the female gaze. There has been this whole half of society that hasn't had the chance to tell the story that much. It feels really exciting to be part of these projects where they’re women-led. There are just interesting takes on things and I think that's for everyone, because we can't have the same stories be retold in the same way all the time. It gets boring. There's so much choice these days.”
As well as Deadloch, Sami also starts in upcoming New Zealand show Double Parked, which starts on Three in June.
“Antonia [Prebble] and I play girlfriends who get pregnant at the same time basically, and have to kind of navigate that.
“We shot it over six weeks in flood-prone, cyclone-prone Auckland in the summer. We've just made this little indie TV show which feels like it was made with a lot of love. Not a lot of time but a lot of love.”
