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Starstruck’s Emma Sidi: ‘I am not interested in making comedy from trauma’

Actor, writer and comedian Emma Sidi is making a name for herself - The Other Richard
Actor, writer and comedian Emma Sidi is making a name for herself - The Other Richard

Had Emma Sidi not got the part of Kate, the lovably neurotic flatmate to walking calamity Jessie in the BBC’s hit rom-com Starstruck – next week back for season two – there would have been an extremely awkward conversation waiting for her back at home, with none other than her own flatmate: Starstruck creator Rose Matafeo, who also stars as Jessie.

Sidi, who has enjoyed a recent smattering of roles across King Gary, Stath Lets Flats, Industry, and Ghosts, first met Matafeo when they were both working the London comedy circuit in their mid-20s. New Zealand-born Matafeo was new to the city, and so she and Sidi organised to go on a “friendship date” on the Southbank. It went so well they started living together in Stoke Newington a short while later.

Which is how Matafeo got the idea for Starstruck’s “crazy, overly intense housemate Kate”, says 27-year-old Sidi, grimacing gamely over Zoom. “I hate to say it, but that is basically me. She was originally going to be called Emma, and Rose’s character was going to be called Rose. But then I said, you probably shouldn’t do that, in case I don’t get the part.”

Surreally, not only did Sidi have to audition for the part she inspired her own flatmate to write, she also had to audition in front of said flatmate. They even commuted to the audition together by tube. “I then sat in the waiting room while Rose went in,” recalls Sidi, slightly dazed by the absurdity of the memory. “I stumbled over my lines so much because I was so unnerved.”

Luckily, Sidi (who, far from neurotically intense, comes across as friendly, thoughtful and sharp) got the part. And her comedic closeness with Matafeo is what made season one such a comforting, joyous watch when it aired during the winter lockdown as six, bitesize episodes about Jessie’s unexpected romance with famous actor Tom. Yet, despite the show’s title, Jessie and her friends are anything but starstruck: far too wrapped up in the everyday charms and tribulations of their daily lives, which prove much more interesting and meaningful than the sheen of Tom’s celebrity. In fact, it is Tom who chases after Jessie and her humdrum life as a cinema usher, desperate to get away from his catty agent, vacuous parties and skin-deep Hollywood romances.

Sidi as Kate alongside Rose Matafeo’s Jessie in Starstruck - Avalon
Sidi as Kate alongside Rose Matafeo’s Jessie in Starstruck - Avalon

This gentle skewering of the celebrity machine becomes more prominent in season two, as the will they/won’t they intrigue between Tom and Jessie is replaced by an entertainingly dysfunctional relationship. Tom’s agent tries to force Jessie into signing an NDA, while Jessie would prefer to watch a performance of Magic Mike on her own than accompany Tom on a glamorous trip abroad.

“We absolutely love celebrity culture, because it’s so outrageous and, as long as it's not in the MeToo zone, it’s so funny,” says Sidi, who, as one of the UK’s brightest young comedians, is surely finding the celebrity world opening up to her a little more every day. “Possibly,” she says, shyly. “But celebrity has changed so much, we’re streaming so many different things all the time, you’re not actually as recognisable as celebrities might have been in the past.”

Sidi, whose comedic nous is a little more whimsical than mainstream, is also not interested in the fast route to fame. She grew up in Woking with two brothers (who now also work in TV), her mother, an NHS nurse, and her father, a physio. “My dad was very flamboyant, very intense, and one of the funniest people I have ever met, so I think he inspired me to be creative,” she says, before recalling in horror her first attempt at comedy in primary school, when she parodied the teachers in assembly and performed Victoria Wood sketches. “So lame,” she winces.

Sidi then went to Cambridge, where she studied Spanish and was part of Footlights, performing character sketches inspired by some of the most absurd personalities she would spend hours watching on reality television. She took some of these character sketches to the Edinburgh Fringe for her successful debut solo show, Character Breakdown, and the next year returned with Telenovela, a critically acclaimed parody of the high-camp Mexican telenovela genre. It was inspired by her year abroad in Mexico, where she had performed a one-woman bilingual comedy show in her non-English speaking local town, and where, perhaps as a result of the language barrier, she mastered her knack for physical comedy.

Telenovola then morphed into La Princessa de Woking for the BBC, a surreal, Spanish-language short starring Sidi as a bereaved daughter draped in black lace, melodramatically piecing together the suspicious circumstances surrounding her mother’s death, set against the tightly manicured front lawns of Woking. “La Princessa de Woking is a microcosm of everything I love,” grins Sidi. “Super high drama, super stupid, super camp.”

Type Sidi’s name into YouTube and you’ll find plenty of character sketches each more deliciously absurd than the last, from a broken woman trying to launch a greeting-card business on Etsy to a flamboyant Spanish professor lecturing an audience about feminism in Spanish.

In the wake of Fleabag, which prompted a slew of TV and theatre shows about the messy, frantic, wine-chugging single woman harbouring a “trauma from her past”, has she ever felt pressure to make a certain type of comedy?

“The answer is yes, I have struggled with that quite a bit. It’s not very trendy to not talk about your trauma. I am much more interested in the silly, clowny side of human character. I mean one of my characters was a Love Island contestant who was obsessed with Billie Piper; another was a Blue Peter wannabe. So it’s not really connecting into the transgressive female body,” says Sidi, who was also excellent in the BBC satire, Pls Like, as the insufferable vlogger Millipede.

“If you're a woman and you're not talking about your messy life, you feel less relevant. But I think the best thing to do is to just stay with your instincts even if that means that it's going to take longer. In a happy way, I’m gonna stick in my lane.”

Sidi appears in Starstruck alongside her partner, Al Roberts - Avalon
Sidi appears in Starstruck alongside her partner, Al Roberts - Avalon

I wonder if Sidi has seen Liz Kingsman’s brilliant one-woman show at the Soho Theatre, which gently mocks the tropes set in motion by Fleabag and this kind of “trendy” female-fronted comedy. “Yes! There's a moment in Liz’s show that I just found beyond funny and really summed up how I felt about a lot of things with this genre. [After she starts to reveal some of her sexual activities], a character says, ‘You don't actually need to talk about w______ all the time, because that's actually really private.’”

But this diverging of genres is what makes Sidi think comedy is in rude health, and she hopes the relaunch of BBC Three will lead to even more varied commissioning. “As comedians we were devastated when it was cancelled, as it gave us so much work. I’m hoping now that it's back, the commissioning will lead to some really exciting new comedy,” she says. “It’s so easy to lambast the moment we’re in or complain about where comedy is at. But I honestly think we might be at a really nice moment where we understand that lots of different things work. The issue-based stuff, and the silly, proper comedy stuff, like Stath Lets Flats for instance.”

Speaking of Stath Lets Flats, I can’t resist a nosy question: is Sidi still in a relationship with one of the show’s stars Al Roberts, who, incidentally, is also Sidi’s on-screen romance in both King Gary and the new season of Starstruck?

“Yes, thank God, we’re making it through the everyday,” she chuckles, a little hesitantly, no doubt bracing herself for a line of questioning about their living arrangements. Amusingly, Roberts moved in with her and Matafeo before lockdown after meeting Sidi at a gig, and Matafeo wrote him into her script too, as Kate’s ludicrously wet boyfriend. So, would they all commute to and from set together then, as a trio?

“Yes, and at one point in season two, we literally film on our road. So I think we just walked down together out of the front door to work.” A pause. “To be clear, we are not a throuple,” she adds, before her eyebrows shoot up in concern as it dawns on her I might make this quote the headline.

The blurred line between the private and public however, has worked in the couple’s favour – particularly in King Gary. “Al and I are very good at resolving our arguments, and when something is resolved, you can take it to set and play with it. In King Gary, there’s a lot of improvisation, so we can use our past issues in a really funny way. So bring your problems to work, definitely,” she says, drily.

Spending so much time with Matafeo, it’s not uncommon for Sidi to find some of her own life written into Starstruck, too. “That Magic Mike scene is so real because that’s literally what me and Rose do for fun,” she says. “And then the cleaner scene in season one, when Jessie is caught coming out of Tom’s flat and the paparazzi think she’s the cleaner and tell her, ‘It’s an honest job.’ That was actually something that happened to me on the bus, when I was holding bags of cleaning products to clean our flat, and these guys were laughing at me, and so I said, ‘Excuse me’, and they said, ‘We’re sorry darling, it’s an honest job!’ I went home and told Rose and she put it in the script.”

Sidi is a little more coy when it comes to the specific anecdotes that may have inspired Hollywood’s more pathetic characters in the new season, including an actor bragging about how chummy he is with George Clooney by listing all the rather unpleasant pranks Clooney plays on him on set. “Actually, it sounds like he’s bullying you,” a concerned Kate replies, a motherly hand on his shoulder.

“Some of the people you meet are just nutty. I was once in LA, and this agent was just shouting my full name, over and over, even though he didn't want to sign me,” she laughs. “He was still shouting it when he dropped me off for my next meeting. Emma Sidi! Emma Sidi! Emma Sidi!” Sounds like he might have made a mistake.


Starstruck season two returns to BBC iPlayer on 7 February