For the second installment of my Pride Series, where I interview actresses to discuss their roles in iconic queer films, I had the immense pleasure of chatting with the bold and talented Maiah Stewardson to discuss her role as Grace in My First Summer.
My First Summer is a commanding, beautifully shot, queer coming of age film that takes place in Australia. It tells a story of first love, trust, and connection in a sincere and innocent, yet powerful way. My First Summer was nostalgic for me, especially Grace and Claudia eating candy necklaces and making bead bracelets, while at the same time, seamlessly falling in love. The film did a great job of evoking emotions of your first love and how it made you feel like you could take on the world. It was the kind of film I wish was around when I was a teenager.
Check out the interview below!
Gabrielle Bisaccia: Let’s start with some easy questions and then ease into the hard ones! What book are you currently reading?
Maiah Stewardson: I’m currently being a bit naughty and have four on the go, which is not allowed! At the moment I just started Big Swiss, which I’m really enjoying. It’s a queer and very sex positive and a bit sexy in a clever way. I think the writing is good and the tone is fun. It’s a nice, light, smart look at queerness, connection, and sex.
GB: What’s your favorite queer film?
MS: This is interesting because I thinks it’s changed a lot and I know growing up my exposure to queer films was not the best. I think my introduction into any kind of queer content was Blue is the Warmest Color, which was not a great start at age 14. I’ve been rewatching a bunch of my favorite queer content and have returned to projects like Booksmart and Bottoms, which are euphoric and joyful. While you have these big, epic works like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, where the queerness is very prominent, projects like Booksmart where the queerness exists and sort of oscillates around the characters is something I really love. These are projects that are quite unequivocally camp and don’t mind being big and joyful and funny. I think I’m speaking a bit to my 15-year-old self that wishes I was around that kind of boisterous, unapologetic queer content, so I’m diving back into a lot of that now.
GB: I saw on your Instagram that you’re a self-proclaimed “plant dad”. How are your plants doing?
MS: They were traveling fine, and I want the record to show that! But I have a female ginger cat. Her name is Otis, and I’m currently watching her try to drink out of the bowl of water and she doesn’t even have one braincell happening here. Otis, if I was to depict her, would love a pale ale, would always have a carabiner on, and would love some sort of working boot. That’s her vibe and I’m so proud of her, but she is eating all our plants! It’s really starting to upset me because now, all the plants have, well, what started with cute little nibbles in the leaves, has become her fully tearing them apart as if they are some sort of toy. So, I would say both the physical health and spiritual health of my plants is not great, but they’re persisting through the horrors!
GB: Speaking of your Instagram, it’s original, bright, and inspiring. You so authentically utilize your platform to connect with your followers and share important and powerful messages. What do you hope resonates the most with someone looking at your photos and reading your words?
MS: I have a lot of friends that are either in the public eye or just use their platform in the way that I do in the sense of showcasing some of my work but also showcasing the things that I’m passionate about. With the current geo-political events that are happening, there is this huge reluctance to say anything at all. Something that has always been important to me, even as a young person, is that there is a bravery in being disliked or having people not want to see your stuff anymore. There is also true power in being authentic to who you are and being able to say what you believe in and what is important to you, with your full chest. If anything, I want to encourage people that even if it’s your first day of learning about an idea or being exposed to something that challenges you, being willing to come on the journey and learn is such an amazing part of being human. I really believe that humans being able to care about other humans is the center of what it means to have a healthy relationship with yourself and your community. There are people who have reached out to me to talk about all kinds of different stuff, from the queer spaces I work in and the mental health spaces and where I sit politically, and have said, ‘Oh this information is really new to me, and it’s made me think.’ Or ‘It’s challenged my previous view, and now I’m considering something different.’ That’s something that’s really important to me and gives me hope, particularly in terms of young people who are growing up in a really different world than you and I were. Also, more superficially, a layer of wanting people to feel free and empowered to play with who they are and how they present is important to me to represent. I try to have a balance between those two things.
GB: You’re a sort of jack of all trades. Tell me about your current endeavors with regards to writing, producing, and comedy.
MS: Jack of all trades is nice to hear, but I think I’m just a throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks kind of person! I do a bunch of improv comedy, which I have such a serious love affair with, and I adore. I get to work with some amazing female and nonbinary comedians, who probably wouldn’t even define themselves as actors or comedians. I’ve met a lot of people who started taking improv classes and they worked in accounting or as an engineer, and never knew that they had comedic sensibilities and now I get to play and perform with them. I’m also working with a long-term friend and collaborator of mine. We’ve known each other since we were 4 years old and traveled these parallel roads and sort of ebbed and flowed and now, we work together along with a producer who’s based out of Sydney. We are working on two shortform pieces of content. The first is a short film in collaboration with two incredible disabled actors who both the director and I have grown up with. The film follows this teenager with down syndrome, her name is Claude, and essentially, she just really wants to experience this amazing erotic fantasy but she’s a teenager living at home with her mother and she’s trying to work out how she can live out that fantasy over the course of one night. It has some fun kink elements and just a really grounded look at what it’s like to be a teenager experiencing sex and sexuality. The actors are really spear-heading the project and we are being guided by them. I’m also in the more infant stages of producing a web series and that again has some fun gender-bending sort of queer but inherently sex positive depictions of what it’s like to be a young woman thinking about intimacy and connection in a world where often our first exposure is problematic. It looks at what it’s like being a young woman who’s experiencing a porn and erotica addition, which is bizarre because I haven’t seen a lot of stuff about that. I’ve read a lot, and this is a project we are working on for me to step into that lead role, so it’s become sort of my baby. It’s nice to be able to explore something that typically has a lot of stigma and taboo around it in this fun and boisterous way, sort of in a similar vein to Bottoms if you’re thinking about how they talk about more serious stuff in an accessible way. It’s fun to be writing those projects and then stepping into them in a performance space and creatively producing them as well. I really enjoy being able to refine the work that I like to make and knowing what my voice is as an artist because sometimes I think as an actor, you’re a bit at the beck and call of what other people are looking for. There is wiggle room because people want to see you make it your own, but it’s nice to be able to have freedom.
GB: Let’s talk about My First Summer. How did you get involved in this project?
MS: I was living in South Australia at the time, and I happened to be in Melbourne when my agent sent through this audition. She thought I’d really like it and since I was in the city that they were doing auditions in, she suggested I go in person. I just inhaled the script in the first sitting and immediately knew exactly where these characters sat in my body. I knew exactly how they felt, and I understood the emotional language of the characters. I read it again shortly after, auditioned, then met the team and chemistry read against a couple of different actors. It all moved rapidly but to me it just felt important that the queer connection was not tokenistic, it didn’t feel exploitative, and I knew that an intimacy coordinator was going to be present on set. I loved the project and Katie Found, who wrote and directed it, is a queer woman herself and it was just important to me to do something that both Katie and I felt was missing from our teenage years. I loved the characters and I loved how much of myself I could bring to the role of Grace; being given that type of freedom was lovely.
GB: How did you prepare for the role?
MS: Because we had to move quickly on this project and because it was an indie film, there wasn’t a heap of time for rehearsal. Part of Katie’s casting was knowing that Markella Kavenagh, who played Claudia, and I, had good impulses and good instincts and we also had a nice friendship, so we were able to trust whatever each other was doing. That was the first thing that helped elevate some of the stress of not having time to prepare. The second thing was that we were out on location at a place called Castlemaine, an hour outside Melbourne, and we all lived there during the time that we were shooting. Being able to be in the environment all the time and, on my day off, being able to take lots of walks, was helpful in getting grounded in the nature we were surrounded by because the scenery almost played a character. The third thing was music, and it was super helpful. Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next album came out at that time and while there was other music I listened to, like lots of early days Michael Jackson, it was loads of Ariana Grande. I don’t really know why, but I think that album just felt fun, sugary, and fearless, and that was helpful. The final thing, which seems silly, was the boots that Grace wears are my actual boots. Her costuming was very feminine, and I had really long hair at the time, and we have no makeup and things are super feminine, but she was also very grounded and proud in how she walks through the world, which is something I did not have at that age. Being able to have these heavier working boots for my character’s costume, that I’d been wearing for years prior, was good because I felt like I already knew how she existed in the world and how she walked through it, both physically and emotionally.
GB: Where did you draw inspiration for your character, Grace? Was she based on someone you know personally or a character you’ve seen in film, or was it really just you and your boots?
MS: It felt a little bit like that! If anything, it was as if I was creating an imaginary friend that I wish had swooped in when I was 15 years old and just been there for me. I was careful to not look at other queer depictions because I really wanted to create this thing from the ground up. I do like to have a little scaffold in terms of what I thought this character could have been, but then to just build her from inside of myself was the most helpful.
GB: The film really resonated with audiences and currently holds a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Did you know the impact the film would have on the community?
MS: No, not at all. The film came out during the thick of Covid and so I know a lot of people were watching this on their own, or with people really close to them, and I would get these messages from young people that told me the film made them realize that they were queer or that they watched it six times in the span of a few weeks and then came out to their parents. That is some of the best stuff you can ever receive. Nice reviews and people complimenting your performance are great, but it’s the messages and how it uplifts audiences that will always be my preference. I really had no idea that it would happen, and I feel super grateful that it did, but more so I’m just so happy that it got in the eyeballs of so many young people that felt really seen by it.
GB: Mental Health is so vital and important to prioritize and talk about, especially among LGBTQ+ youth. Can you tell me about your work and advocacy with mental health?
MS: Although acting and being creative is absolutely the first and biggest love in my life, it is a gig economy and you do need things to keep you motivated and pay your bills between acting jobs. For me, it’s important that it’s something that I’m meaningfully invested in, so for several years now I’ve been working as a mental health support worker. Not only do I want to be somebody that advocates for mental health, but somebody who talks about the journey when you live with a mental illness. It’s something I’ve been doing professionally for several years and I’m grateful to the people that I’ve worked with and helped support because their vulnerability is not lost on me. In terms of the mental health work, I’ve had a lot of lived experience and it’s helpful to be able to talk about that because, particularly in an online space, which is totally curated, being able to be frank about the fact that there is no linear journey to recovery is important. For folks in the queer community, there are so many layers to that experience and what I’m passionate about is hearing stories from and amplifying the voices of young queer people of color who have multiple layers of how they exist throughout the world. Often those stories and those experiences aren’t being seen. Statistically, we look at what it’s like for young queer people, in terms of their mental health, and it is different from their cis het peers. Being able to be a person that is happy to openly talk about that is important to me and makes me feel I’m at least doing something with my lived experience and my professional knowledge. Queer advocacy and queer health is certainly in a better space in terms of talking about what mental health looks like for queer people and what suicide prevention looks like for queer people and that’s a good thing and I something I want to be part of.
GB: What’s next for you?
MS: The industry took a hit post-Covid and then there were the writers’ strikes, so the world is starting to get back to a shape of normalcy, but the next twelve months looks like making a bunch of my own work which I’m really excited by. I’m also doing a bit of acting training abroad and then I’m currently in the process of getting my intimacy coordinator training done, so I’m doing that with the IDC and then in the first half of next year I’ll go over to the states to get my final sign-off for that and then spend time in the US, which will be good! I’m hoping that there are some other joyful and juicy queer roles that I can step into and I’m just generally excited to be working with new people and telling stories that I think are important that hopefully make audiences feel really seen!
