Madeleine Sami: one cool sister

Actress Madeleine Sami

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Madeleine Sami smuggles three mandarins into The Strawberry Alarm Clock, a café in Parnell. A waiter gives us a plastic toy zebra to mark our table - we push its bum into someone's half eaten chocolate cake and cackle together like witches. Excellent. She is as immature as I am.

She radiates an exciting, mad energy that splits through the shell of a pretty-faced, gentle, ‘glass-half-full' kind of a girl. She's the most confident onstage member of the band The Sami Sisters, but New Zealand knows her better as an actress. (You may have seen her in Sione's Wedding, Xena, Outrageous Fortune, Rude Awakenings, Eagle Vs Shark, The Insider's Guide to Happiness, or failing those, Shortland Street.)

Sami plays with words, she gives stick and takes it back without a hint of defensiveness, but she dodges anything too personal. I ask her a silly question about whom she would most like to be stuck in a room with. She doesn't want to answer that one. Whenever she feels she is talking too much about herself, possibly assuming she's becoming boring, she compensates by becoming a different character or adopts one of her many flawless accents.

She starts with upper-class English: "I learnt to act on the mean streets of Onehunga. I used to hustle cheques, small change and knock people out for their shoes." Sami was in fact raised in Onehunga. "My mum looked after me. My dad was in Fiji ‘cause he wasn't allowed in the country." Were they married? "No I was a bastard. Still am. She got him back somehow and they had more kids."

She switches to cheesy American when recalling her role as an Amazonian in Xena. "I had lines like ‘They've got catapults!" or ‘There's a shark!' or ‘We're all gonna die!' I'm barely in it. But I don't die. I'm one of the only Amazonians that doesn't die. My Amazon was a coward, but my boobs were huge. They do amazing things with your boobs in Xena. They have all manner of pushy-uppy technology."

Done with her mandarins, Sami plops the peel in a mound onto my plate of eggs benedict. "Oh. Have you finished?"

No.

"Oh. Sorry."

It was nine years ago, aged 21, that Sami began performing Toa Frazer's play, No.2. She left audiences stunned by the ease with which she adapted to six dissimilar characters, and received an endless list of impeccable, five-star reviews. She won three Chapman Tripp Theatre awards and a Festival First Award and nomination for Best Actress at Edinburgh Festival. Her last tour was at the King's Head Theatre in Islington, in 2003.

But when No.2 the film was made, despite expectations, Sami was not in the cast. "I was originally cast in the film and then when we were about to start shooting I was told that I wasn't going to be in it." She was devastated.

"It sent me into a spin; I didn't know if I wanted to act any more... My whole career up to that point was pretty much that show." Has she any idea why she wasn't cast? "I've gone over it and over it; it's a lawn that's been mowed way too much - it's like mud now." Sami bears no grudges, "Actors are pretty low on the food chain and you've got to be really savvy and you've got to look out for yourself and expect that things like that are going to happen." Which part would she have played? "A lot of people thought I was going to be playing Mia's [Blake's] part because we look like each other, but I wasn't cast for that part at all. I remember saying to Toa really early on I wanted to play the nana. I knew that would be the best part because that was my favourite part in the play and I thought... prosthetics?"

Has she ever watched the film? "No."

Last October, a previously untrained Sami went to Paris to take a course with tutor Philip Gaulier. "I've always been very anti-training because I think people get institutionalised. Or they get a bit brainwashed." She puts on a French accent: "Gaulier is a French masteur of théatre but he specialises in Bouffon, clown, or Buffoon. He's a little guy, with a Japanese wife, a beret and a scarf and he has a little drum that he bongs. A Bouffon is like a type of medieval clown. In old times they were the outcasts, the homosexuals, the deformed and the slightly mental and they were banished from the big cities and lived in the swamps. They were only allowed into town every year to entertain, and they were considered so hideous that they could warn off the plague."

During these performances, the Bouffon's goal was often to mock the beautiful, or be it normal-looking people, as much as possible. "We'd spend a couple of days where we'd have a big fat stomach and you'd have to develop a character around this big fat stomach, or a fat arse, or no arms, or you're a dwarf or a combination of all these things and you end up with a Bouffon for yourself. Mine was blacked-out teeth, mono brow and I think I had a fat ass... So you get up and do these exercises and if he finds you boring he will bong his drum and say, ‘boring'."

Sami's latest project is The Sami Sisters, the band she embarked on with her siblings. They've been singing together since they were girls. "We went to Australia last year to visit my brother and we thought, we'll just sing together, do some gigs. We're all songwriters and we all sing each other's songs. We all have a guitar each and we all play." Her voice descends into a Southern American drawl: "It's sort of a bit country and a bit 20s, 40s, 50s girl group, 80s pop - a bit folk, Indie."

Sister Anji has won a prestigious bNET award and toured with the likes of David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights and Anika Moa. The youngest sibling, Priya, has been a regular performer in Auckland since her early teens. Her ultra-catchy pop original Mrs Julian Casablancas was a local radio hit. The Sami Sisters supported Rufus Wainwright in February and excited the crowd with their delicious melodies and their stunning sibling harmonies.

Sami's face lights up, "Music's the most exciting thing for me at the moment; I've got a bit of momentum on that going now. I find it really empowering to do music because you're playing the instruments, you're writing the songs. There's very little between you and the audience, and I really appreciate that immediate connection."

When I take Sami's photograph she gets bored and starts to rap, about herself and her life on the "mean streets of Onehunga". She's got a big smile on her face, but she's pretty good at it. She continues non-stop until the end of the shoot. Perhaps she should rap more often.

Over the next 10 years Sami would like to have children, play guitar, go to the gym and be in an action movie, "with kung fu; and it's a romantic comedy that I get to play all of the characters and I get to play the villain and the hero and it seems like it's going to work out fine in the end and then it all ends tragically... Set in New York and Paris and... Onehunga and Iceland. I'd like to be a part of an awesome theatre experience as well." She puts together a strategy: "Make an album with the band, try to find some money. World tour next year - we just want to be as big as Coldplay by, like, September... "

As it seems everything Sami touches turns to gold, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they were.

Madeleine Sami will be appearing in The Jaquie Brown Diaries, to screen on TV3 later in the year. She also writes a blog on www.thewire.co.nz

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