New Zealand actor Madeleine Sami Photo: Courtesy of The Breaker Upperers
Madeleine Sami's career is running hot, she's nominated for a Logie for Best Actress for black comedy Deadloch and her homegrown comedy, Double Parked, is launching its second season next week.
As Detective Eddie Redcliffe in Australian comedy Deadloch, Sami got to flex a lot of different acting muscles, she told RNZ's Saturday Morning.
"I got to be serious, I got to be funny. I got to improv. I got to do a lot of stunts and climbing things and jumping off things."
The writers tried to reverse and play around with the gender stereotypes of traditional cop shows on Deadloch, she said.
"Eddie is like that brash male character that you often see in a cop show who hasn't got their life together … as a woman, you don't often get to play characters that are just unapologetic and crude and brash."
When the show came out, a lot of people, particularly men, found the character of Eddie hard to deal with, Sami said.
"We're so used to seeing women play mothers and caregivers. When we see a brash woman on screen it can be quite jarring for a lot of people.
"There's been this tradition of protectiveness or sacredness of the feminine so it was really fun to get to play this really out-the-gate woman who just does not have her shit together."
Sami and her old friend Antonia Prebble star as a lesbian couple who find themselves pregnant at the same time in Double Parked.
Prebble and Sami go back a way, they studied clowning together in Paris in their 20s, she said.
"The first season I was just like 'Oh man, she's really good'. Like, you know, I forget that my friend who I love dearly is actually really good at what she does and to witness it firsthand was really cool.
"It's a really fun experience to make the show, and we really make it with a lot of love. I think that's what came through in the first season, and hopefully will come through in the second season."
Series one of Double Parked ended with the two lead characters giving birth, Sami says, and series two - which launches on Thursday 22 August - takes off from there.
"It's just the added chaos of that and trying to navigate all these relationships and just the day-to-day hardship of what it's like to have two babies and two, probably hormonal women … it's a lot."
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