There are performers who chase the spotlight, and then there are performers who simply can’t imagine doing anything else. Lisa McCune belongs firmly in the second category. A four-time Gold Logie winner and one of the most recognisable faces in Australian television and theatre, she has spent more than three decades moving between screen, stage and, more recently, the ballroom floor — and she still talks about the work with the enthusiasm of someone just starting out.
In this episode of Showtime, Andrew G sits down with Lisa ahead of the Melbourne leg of her national tour of Steel Magnolias, the beloved Robert Harling play now showing at the Athenaeum Theatre. Their conversation moves from the teenage moment that sparked her love of performing, through the highs and lessons of a career built on Blue Heelers, four Gold Logies and a stack of major musical theatre roles, to why she still feels like a beginner every time she starts a new show.
Lisa’s love affair with performing didn’t arrive gradually — it arrived in a single moment. Growing up in Western Australia, she spent Saturday afternoons watching old movie musicals on free-to-air TV after netball, soaking up the era of Grease and ABBA. But it was a trip to see Les Misérables at the Theatre Royal with her mother, at around fourteen years old, that changed everything. Watching the barricade turn on stage, she knew instantly that this was what she wanted to do with her life.
That instinct led her, after graduating from WAAPA, into the role that would make her a household name: Maggie Doyle in Blue Heelers. She’s candid about the fact that the show wasn’t an instant hit — Channel Seven backed it for a full year before it found its audience, a level of patience she notes is almost unthinkable in television today. What the show gave her, she says, wasn’t overnight fame but six years surrounded by some of the country’s best actors, directors and writers, many of whom remain close friends today. It was, in her words, where she built her family.
Andrew and Lisa also dig into what fame actually costs — and what it doesn’t. Rather than resenting the loss of anonymity, Lisa reframes it: recognition can occasionally work against you in an audition room, when casting directors decide a familiar face isn’t “right” for a part before you’ve even walked in. Her response has always been to push for the chance to prove otherwise. It’s a mindset she credits to understanding, only after years in the industry, that rejection rarely reflects an actor’s talent — it’s usually about chemistry, casting logic, or a vision that was locked in long before the audition ever happened.
One of the episode’s most grounded threads is how Lisa has handled success. Winning four Gold Logies could easily have become a source of pressure, but she describes deliberately keeping herself humble in the moment — slipping off her heels after a win and joining the regular taxi queue rather than waiting for a car, a ritual she still associates with staying connected to reality. That same instinct shows up in how she talks about her career more broadly: watching veteran actors like Ruth Cracknell and Pamela Rabe still rehearsing lines backstage decades into their careers taught her early on that she wanted to be, as she puts it, a technician rather than a star — someone built for longevity, not just a moment.
Steel Magnolias marks a return to touring for Lisa, something she says she genuinely loves despite the demanding schedule. She discovered, partway through preparing for the role, that the story was based on true events and originally written for the stage before the film adaptation — a detail that deepened her connection to the material and to the character of M’Lynn, whom she describes as carrying real emotional weight through the piece. Being a mother of three herself, she draws directly on that experience playing a mother whose children are growing up and leaving home over the course of the story.
The conversation also turns to what live theatre offers that no screen can replicate. Lisa describes the particular feeling of a thousand-person audience reacting to a story in real time — something she says she can physically sense on stage, even before the curtain call confirms it. It’s this collective, in-the-room experience, she argues, that keeps drawing audiences back to Melbourne’s theatres even in an age of endless streaming options.
Melbourne itself comes up as a recurring source of pride throughout the chat. Lisa speaks warmly about the city’s cluster of historic theatres — the Princess, the Comedy, Her Majesty’s, the Regent, the Athenaeum and the Forum — sitting within a few blocks of each other, alongside the independent scene at venues like Red Stitch and La Mama. She’s particularly passionate about getting children into theatres early, describing those first experiences as memories that stay with people for life and often spark a lifelong appreciation for live performance.
Throughout the episode, Lisa returns again and again to the idea of collaboration — from the writers and directors who shaped her early career, to co-stars like the Umbilical Brothers, whose comedic telepathy she describes as unlike anything she’s worked with before. For her, no performance, however small, is ever really a solo act.
Asked directly whether she thinks about legacy, Lisa’s answer is simple: not really. Being a mother of three keeps her grounded in a way that fame never could — her own children, she jokes, often don’t even know when she has an opening night. It’s a fitting note for an artist who has spent thirty years chasing the work itself rather than the recognition that comes with it, and who shows no signs of slowing down.
Steel Magnolias, starring Lisa McCune, is showing at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre from 23 July to 9 August 2026. Tickets are available at steelmagnoliasplay.com.au or through Ticketmaster.
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