At seventeen, Maddy Tyers was on a Melbourne set with two other teenagers who would go on to become some of the biggest names in Hollywood. She didn’t know it at the time. All three of them were shooting their first-ever TV roles together on the children’s series The Elephant Princess, and for a while, Maddy assumed her own path would look something like theirs. It didn’t — and the story of how she made peace with that is at the heart of this episode of Showtime.
Andrew G’s conversation with Maddy, recorded ahead of the release of her new comedy series The Sonny Disposition, starts with something deceptively simple: what actually drives her to keep telling stories. For Maddy, the answer goes back further than her career. Creativity, she says, was simply built into her household growing up, with a musician mother and a father with a deep love of film. She describes living with what she calls “content FOMO” — a constant hunger to consume and make stories that she says isn’t a choice so much as who she is.
That instinct has taken her in two very different directions at once: the broad, silly comedy she makes with her husband and creative partner Jimmy Eaton, and a more vulnerable, personal thread of work, including a children’s picture book she wrote reflecting on her own experience with body image issues as a young girl. Both sides, she says, feel equally true to who she is.
The more difficult chapter of the conversation centres on what happened after The Elephant Princess. Maddy had just finished high school, was living what felt like the dream, and assumed the rest of her career would simply follow. It didn’t. As her co-stars Margot Robbie and Liam Hemsworth went on to break through internationally, Maddy found herself comparing her own trajectory to theirs, compounded by body image struggles she hadn’t fully worked through as a teenager. She eventually stepped away from performing altogether, took an overseas trip that didn’t deliver the reset she was hoping for, and came home unsure of what came next.
That uncertainty led her, almost by accident, to the Starlight Children’s Foundation, where she became a Captain Starlight — bringing play and distraction therapy to children in hospital. It turned out to be the reset she needed. Removing her own ego from the equation, and creating purely because she loved it rather than because it might lead somewhere, changed her relationship with performing entirely. It’s also where she met Jimmy, now her husband and the co-creator of their production company, Win Win Productions.
Maddy is candid about how long it took her to understand that most rejection in this industry isn’t personal — it’s contextual, tied to casting decisions and creative visions she was never shown the reasoning behind. She’s developed her own ritual for processing it: after every audition, once it’s done, she rips up the script. It’s a small, deliberate act of closure that lets her move on rather than replay every scene in her head.
There’s one particular door she didn’t walk through that still crosses her mind. At eighteen, she was offered a lead role in a New Zealand production that could have taken her overseas at a pivotal moment. She turned it down, on the advice of her parents, at a time when she wasn’t in a strong place mentally to handle six months away from home. She’s made peace with that decision, recognising now that the years that followed — including her time at Starlight and meeting Jimmy — unfolded exactly the way they needed to.
These days, Maddy says the greater thrill isn’t landing a role someone else has given her — it’s building something from scratch with people she trusts. That shift in mindset is what led to Win Win Productions, the company she and Jimmy started as a way to stop waiting for permission and simply start making things, fitting shoots around nap times and lunch breaks with their toddler daughter, Winnie, often nearby holding a light or calling “action.”
That same energy carried through to The Sonny Disposition, the new satirical comedy she stars in alongside writers Simon Taylor and Josh Samuels. The show, about a group of comedians running a podcast, began life almost by accident — shot in a borrowed co-working space over a single week, made purely for the fun of it with friends. It’s since grown into a full series for Stan and Nine, and Maddy is candid about the show’s central idea: the gap between the polished, confident personas performers present to an audience and who they actually are once the microphone is switched off — something she says resonates well beyond the world of podcasting.
The Sonny Disposition premieres September 1 on Stan, 9Now and 9Go!
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