Everyone please welcome lovely friend and fellow (voice)actor Maddie McGuire to A Broadway Body: Continued Conversations! Maddie and I met online in 2020 during Ashli Pollard (of The Doers)’s business course, Square One Accelerator. We’d only known each other over the internet until the fall of 2024 when we finally got to meet in person! Since then, we’ve gotten closer and closer, and Maddie was one of the first people to express to me how much she believes in what I’m doing with this project. (Thank you Maddie!)

Maddie is an inspirational gem of a human being. She’s the voice of Comcast on TV (along with many others), and she does a lot of other voice acting work as well. She’s such a humble, caring, talented woman with a heart of pure gold, and I am so excited for you to hear our conversation. Our discussion floats around connecting with our bodies to allow us to use our voice confidently in the spaces we frequent, the journey of embracing aging and our ever-changing bodies (and careers), and Maddie’s journey with running a half marathon. Tune in and enjoy Maddie and I’s conversation!

“It’s been happening recently too, Megan. Probably from a year ago when we first kind of met and I was hearing so much about your business, I feel like my brain – I've just been so much more open to explore what comes up, whether that be a feeling, a thought, challenging myself to be like, “Let's just try something different today with the workout clothes I'm wearing,” or whatever the case may be, instead of getting locked into comfort, not that that's a negative thing at all. I just think that that's become such a safety net, especially in COVID for me. I'm just ready to write a new permission slip, and that's what all these findings are is like, “Okay, what's that permission slip we're writing next, and what are we kind of sorting through to get there?””

- Maddie McGuire

Maddie McGuire: I feel like I've had a couple phases before in my life where it's almost like I woke up and realized my body has changed, and then it's forced me to reevaluate my relationship with my body, health, clothes, feeling sexy, feeling strong, all of those things. And so, I feel like I'm in a period of that, of almost like, okay, things have changed. I'm accepting that. Now, what does past acceptance and actually falling in love with my body again look like, or a different form of the relationship.

Megan Gill: Yeah. It’s evolving and how do you mentally have radical acceptance for the way that it's evolving while also working towards loving and caring for and appreciating the changes, because I feel like it's so easy to be like, “Ah! I’m changing!” Whether it's my body is changing in the sense that it's getting older, or my knee is starting to hurt a little bit more now, or whether it's in a sense of, “Oh, I've gained weight,” or “Oh, I've lost weight, and like now my clothes don't fit, and how am I supposed to feel sexy in a pair of jeans that don't fit me right, whether I've gained weight or lost weight?”

So, oh, gosh. I feel like this is just such a relatable topic probably for so many women and people in general.

Maddie McGuire: Yeah.

Megan Gill: Do you feel like you've gone through different periods in your life of having to reevaluate kind of like you are right now?

Maddie McGuire: Yeah. I feel like – and I was thinking about that too, where I was like, when have I felt like this before? And every time's different, obviously, but I feel like the first big one, I was never like chubby, per se, as a kid, but I definitely had a lot of baby fat in my tummy and my face. And then when I started going through puberty, really, almost like the last two years of high school, growing a little bit and things changed, I got more attention. I was also starting to act at that time, and I was mainly doing theater improv things off camera. And then that was kind of the first time I was also starting to do on-camera acting. My body was changing.

And I feel like I've been pretty lucky because I don't think I've ever had a true issue with disordered eating, per se. But there are two times in my life where, looking back, I was like, oh, I had tendencies that kind of started like ebbing into that category. And that was the first time where I was like, “Oh, I'm getting praise. I'm getting validation for the changes that my body naturally did. Let's do more.”

Megan Gill: Mm, yeah. Wow.

Maddie McGuire: So let's control our eating more, everything. That was the first time I even noticed it. And then from there, there's been a couple other times throughout my twenties, I feel like when I was 25, that was the first time I was like, “Oh, I have hips. My hips are starting to come in.” I was like, “I'm looking different in jeans than I did when I was 21 or 22 or 18.”

And then I really think there was like another big shift into my thirties where I was like, “Oh wow, okay. My body's like becoming more womanly, and it's actually becoming a lot stronger than it used to be.” And also I think I've noticed different things with my face and my neck and other parts of my body. So yeah, I would say around 18, 25 and then 31/32 have been three very distinctive markers where I was like, “Oh.” I woke up and I feel like I noticed the shift.

Megan Gill: This is so interesting, and how fascinating that it's coming out of like our teenage years, and into your early twenties, and then sort of around that 25 mark where you're like, “Okay, well, I'm definitely not a teen teenager anymore. I'm like a full young adult.” And then I do think moving into your thirties, I mean, I'm experiencing it myself where you're like, “Oh, these are the gray hairs that they talk about, that our moms talked about. These are the crow's feet or the wrinkles,” or “My friends are getting Botox? Like, what? Okay, do I need to get Botox?” Like, all of those things that then come with being in your thirties. Or, gosh, I was in my yoga class this morning and seriously my knee, there was a little pain there. And I'm like, “Am I good?” Oh, my god.

Maddie McGuire: You know, when they're like, “Okay, whatever, obviously be aware of your body,” in different classes. You’re like, “Not for me, I'm fine.” And then yeah, all of a sudden you're like, “Is this one of those moments where I'm pushing myself?” Because I want to be like, “No, you're fine. That's not happening. But you're like…”

Megan Gill: Like, I'm literally aging. Yeah, I'm 32, but at the same time, our bodies day by day are getting older and just having that recognition. But that's beside the point.

I think that what's most interesting to me about what you were saying before about your recognition of, “Oh, I'm coming into –,” I think you said like your last couple years of high school when you started to notice that the way your body was naturally changing and evolving was leading you to get more attention. I think that's a really important piece to pull out and note here. And how that, then, catapulted you to want to continue to maintain that.

Maddie McGuire: Right.

Megan Gill: Because I also can very much relate with that sentiment as well. And for me it was when I entered college was when I started to realize that if I ate this and worked out like this, my body would get smaller.

Maddie McGuire: Mm-hmm.

Megan Gill: And then that’s when I started to get the attention that I'd never gotten in high school, middle school, prior. And, I mean, I think I was very much driven by a similar mentality of like, “I need to maintain this because I don't ever wanna go back to the world before where I didn't get attention - in acting, from my peers, from my family, from boys.” Whatever it was, it was like, “Oh yeah, no, this is what –,” like the comments about how my body was changing and how my body looked at that point. That is what society teaches us is “good” or what we should “strive for,” right? At least like when we were going through our high school and college years in the 2000s/2010s.

Maddie McGuire: Well, and you said two things, Megan. There was something you posted on your Instagram that pretty much was like, “Bodies are meant to change. Bodies are literally always in a state of growth,” and that really stuck with me when I saw it. So I've been thinking about that since I saw it on your Instagram a couple weeks ago, and then you just said something about “maintain,” this need or this want to maintain this size, this look, this whatever it is that we've been getting validation and praise for. And I feel like those two thoughts literally just captured so much of the duality that I've been in of this acceptance of, “Wait, my body's like a growing, living organism that is changing every day, and this trying to relinquish that almost gripping on wanting to still maintain something that, one, is not even relevant or longer there anymore. But there still is this little bit of a fight that I'm constantly trying to reframe that's like, “What if XYZ could lead back to the ballpark of what that size was,” you know what I mean?

Megan Gill: Yes. No, I know exactly what you mean because I think that's when we get caught in this really, really detrimental cycle of control in order to get the thing that we think we should want. And there's no freedom in that. There's no joy in that, at least in my experience. And it's just like a lot of unfortunate mental gymnastics that, then, we are hyper-focused on like the eating and the exercise and the equation of if I do this plus this I'll get this result, which then takes us away from