Winning Miss Universe Australia, competing on a national reality TV show, and writing her own book. At the age of 30, Maria Thattil has achieved a great deal of things, but nothing's quite like her latest project that's as personal as it gets.
Finding her feet off the back of her first highly-publicised romantic breakup, the model and women's rights advocate has plunged into the saturated market of podcasts. She promises hers, called The Maria Thattil Show, isn't just any post-pandemic podcast.
"I think with everyone who's ever made a podcast, no two people are alike and your lived experiences are different. I'm not going to be anything other than myself," Thattil tells Refinery29 Australia.
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"It's fundamentally going to do what I've built my entire career on, and that's enabling people to celebrate their differences, have a laugh, have a good time and have fun doing it."
Promising no topic's off limits, Thattil shares raw accounts of her life that haven't been exposed as of yet, using guest interviews and listener questions to charm audiences. In the first two episodes that have dropped so far, Thattil shares tips for dealing with relationships and self-esteem, and also interviews her father, who is a South Asian former Catholic priest, and her brother.
"I didn't love him (her dad) explaining his ideas of what a fuck buddy was by describing it as being purely for pleasure," she laughs. "That made me want to slither out of my skin and it was like, 'Oh my god, it's so cringe even hearing you describe it that way'."
But that's the beauty of having these conversations on air. Talking to your parents about sex can be clumsy and frank. There's no science behind it, and it's often even more awkward when you come from an immigrant family and a culture that has historically viewed talking about issues like sex and menstruation as taboo.
"It opened up the dialogue," says Thattil. "You're never going to be completely comfortable broaching topics like this with your family, depending on your background, and it's showing people that's OK."
Thattil and her brother Dominic were born in Melbourne after her parents migrated to Australia from India in the 1990s. As her dad speaks on the podcast about his upbringing that involved training to be a priest from the age of 13, you can't help but wonder how Thattil's own younger years were impacted by simply being the daughter of a brown Catholic priest.
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"I'm so glad you asked that," she says, recalling her family running the local church choir when she was 12 to 16 years old. Each family member played an instrument every week, and Thattil was in charge of singing solos.
"When my high school friends got wind of it, I remember it was all the gospel girl jokes: Is your family like the family in Sister Act?' Everyone thought that I would just naturally be a prude," she says.
"It was like, 'Are your parents super strict? Your dad used to be a Catholic priest. Are you going to marry an Indian doctor?' It was just stereotype after stereotype."
Instances like this spark mixed emotions for the model. On the one hand, she's still hurt by the discrimination and stereotyping. On the other, she's fond of what was actually "a really beautiful time" in her life, bonding with her family over music, charity barbecues and a strong sense of community.
The adversity she's faced since a young age though is what has driven her to launch projects like this podcast.
"That's what limited representation and visibility is," she says of the discrimination she faced at school. "You form ideas about people based on these small things."
But in her own way, she's changing what representation looks like in Australia. She's one of three women of colour to win Miss Universe Australia. The first South Asian Australian woman to have a regular morning show segment on a commercial TV network. And she came out as bisexual on national television last year. In a country where tall poppy syndrome against women is undeniably rife, Thattil won't apologise for her accomplishments, nor what her next podcast episode will say.
"I'm really proud of what I've been able to achieve, particularly in two years as a woman of colour in Australian media. I know there's an appetite for it. Now, I'm just doing it my way."
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