Madeleine Sami

Entertaining has always come naturally to Madeleine Sami. At an early age she began impersonating, singing and performing in front of her first audience.

"The only training I've ever had was as a kid, performing for my family," says Sami. "There's a lot of support within that early family environment, because you get to fall on your bum, but there's always someone to clap and go, 'oh, that was good,' and support you."

Those early comedy routines and plays gave her a good foundation to build on through high school, where an early career highlight was impersonating singer Alanis Morrisette while rollerblading in vinyl snakeskin pants. In an interview for TV series Funny As, Sami called it "the coolest role" she'd ever had. 

Plans on taking a gap year were put aside when she was offered the opportunity to join Toa Fraser's two-person play Bare. The performance was a hit with audiences and Sami found herself transported from high school student to overnight sensation at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival.

After returning home, Sami made her first television appearance, with a five-month stint on Shortland Street. The then-18-year-old played the show’s first core cast Indian character, 29-year-old Doctor Shivani Naran. It may have been a relatively short time on the popular soap, but it was a memorable one. "People still remember it," she says. "People still come up to me sometimes, especially in Fiji."

Sami's versatility was soon being showcased on the small screen. She did comedy on Pio Terei's sketch show Pio!, and was nominated for her first screen award for quirky one-off tale Fish Skin Suit, playing an absentee parent who breezes back into town.

Her uncanny knack for impersonation saw Sami return to the stage in a role created for her by playwright Toa Fraser following the success of Bare. The one-person show, No. 2, tells the story of feisty Fijian-Kiwi matriarch Nanna Maria, who gathers her divided extended family around her for one last family feast. The one-person show contained nine different personas; Sami toured the play for almost two years.

In 2004, Sami appeared in Gaylene Preston's thriller Perfect Strangers, and joined the ensemble cast of acclaimed TV series The Insiders Guide to Happiness, playing a hairdresser who sets out to persuade her boyfriend's parents to let him date someone who isn't Samoan. Then 2006 saw Sami take on a supporting role as quirky romantic interest to Oscar Kightley's character in the popular Sione's Wedding, cementing her reputation as a leading comedy actor. 

Her comedic skills were also played to great effect in The Jaquie Brown Diaries where Sami was part of the core cast, playing Jaquie's nemesis Serita Singh. The NZ Herald remarked that Sami's appearance "doubled the quirk factor" on the show. 

In 2010, Sami took on one of her biggest challenges to date, TV series Super City. Drawing from characters she had created for the stage, Sami played "a bunch of diverse, strange and hilarious characters living in different corners of Auckland" across "two glorious seasons" (as The Spinoff put it). Directed by Taika Waititi in season one and Oscar Kightley in season two, Sami, along with co-writer Tom Sainsbury, created and played a host of characters — including a Niuean rugby player,  a British panel beater and an ageing cheerleader — all grounded in her hometown of Auckland. 

Sami said that the show was partly a response to "people who tried to put all these limitations on me because of my age, my gender and my ethnicity … I’m just going to play all the characters of all the ages, genders and ethnicities and get it out of my system. It’s just about taking the power back a little bit."

In 2013, Sami ventured back into the world of animated series — having previously provided various character voices for bro'Town — voicing the character of Mum (and others) in the popular Aroha Bridge, an animated web series about a suburban hip hop band of siblings. The series moved to Māori Television for its third season, where Sami was credited as a writer as well as voice actor. 

Sami then took a role in Jane Campion's acclaimed television drama, Top of the Lake, before appearing in Taika Waititi's What We Do in the Shadows.

In 2016, Sami made her first foray into directing, on the second season of sketch comedy show Funny Girls." I think it was time for that sort of show to be made", she explained. "I don’t know that it was a gamble because I don’t think they spent that much money on it." Later she both directed and co-starred in "sweet little comedy" Double Parked. Sami and Antonia Prebble both wore fake bellies to play a lesbian couple who get pregnant at the same time. 

In between these projects, Sami brought her considerable talents to the big screen — co-writing, directing and co-starring in The Breaker Upperers, alongside fellow comedian, Jackie van Beek. Screen Daily reviewer Sarah Watt praised it as an "hilarious and heartfelt ode to female friendship [that] wins hearts and hearty guffaws along the way".

After debuting at American festival South by Southwest in 2018, the film had a successful NZ release and was picked up by Netflix for screening. The journey had not been a short one: after collaborating with van Beek on other projects, the pair had spent about five years on and off writing the script. Ambitious early drafts, which included speedboat chases, were chiselled back to "the underlying story of these two women and what their lives have become because of some sort of trauma they haven’t dealt with".

After the success of The Breaker Upperers, Sami turned her sights to drama, playing the role of detective Marie Da Silva in miniseries The Bad Seed. In a 2019 NZ Herald interview, Sami explained that the timing was right after all the hard work of getting Breaker Upperers to the screen. "I was so ready for it … to just come in and act, it was a nice change — to play drama, and to be part of something quite dark, brooding and slow-moving.” Sami played detective again in Ant Timpson's genre-twisting Come to Daddy, and Tasmanian-set black comedy Deadloch.

Sami's other directing credits include episodes of Pax Assadi's Raised by Refugees, Australian gold rush comedy Gold Diggers, and the 2024 comedic drama Madam.

A consistently entertaining, versatile and multi-faceted performer and creator, Sami has also co-presented three seasons of series The Great Kiwi Bake Off (with Hayley Sproull), appeared on the first season of Taskmaster NZ and makes music with her siblings as The Sami Sisters, releasing an album, Happy Heartbreak, in 2011.

Profile written by Zara Potts, July 2023, updated and published February 2026

Sources include
Madeleine Sami
Madeleine Sami 'Madeleine Sami: The Amazonian that didn't die...' (Video interview), NZ On Screen, Director Andrew Whiteside, 2011
'Madeleine Sami - Funny As Interview', (Video interview), NZ On Screen, Director Rupert Mackenzie, 2019
Peter Douglas, 'Ranking all Madeleine Sami’s Super City Characters', The Spinoff, 29 September 2016
George Fenwick, 'The Bad Seed', The NZ Herald, 4 April 2019 
Michelle Hewitson, 'TV Review – Jaquie Brown Diaries' - The NZ Herald, 26 July 2008
Dale Husband, 'Madeleine Sami: No holding her back', E-Tangata, 9 September 2018
Sarah Nealon, 'How Madeleine Sami accidentally ended up starring in Double Parked', Stuff, 1 June 2023
Susannah Walker ‘Boots and All', Metro, 21 September 2016
Gilbert Wong, 'Madeleine Sami – Chameleon at the crossroads', The NZ Herald, 25 September 2001