Heartbreak High, the rare extremely gay show to last beyond a single season on Netflix while getting progressively gayer, has also been a star vehicle for incredible 26-year-old Australian actor and musician Ayesha Madon, who’s earned AACTA Award and Logie Award nominations for her role in the reboot of a classic Australian teen series. She plays lead character Amerie Wadia, who Kayla describes as a character who “in another series [would] be the prototypical mean girl or the one-liner bully, but here, she’s allowed to be flawed, complex, someone to root for or against in oscillations.” Amerie is straight, but she’s surrounded by queers. Today in a Gay Times cover story, Madon came out as queer herself:
I only kind of properly admitted, out loud, that I was bisexual two or three years ago. It feels recent. It’s pretty interesting watching myself be attracted to [girls]. My first kiss was with a girl. I’ve actually never spoken about my sexuality before in anything, so this is pretty new.
My first kiss was with a girl called Louise and I had the biggest crush on her. She was in my acting class when I was like 11. I remember she was chewing gum and in order to kiss her I had to like to pretend that I wanted to like try the gum! We kissed and it was amazing. Since then, I had the inkling, but being surrounded by so many creatives and how much more normalised it’s becoming. It has given me the courage to feel comfortable in that as well. Sometimes I feel like I’m a fake queer person because I’m not massive on queer culture, sometimes, I feel that liking girls is not enough?
She also shared that growing, up, she felt herself “being conditioned or gaslighted into thinking that I was straight. I look back now at all these signs like I’ve had crushes on girls my whole life but in my head, I was like oh that’s just nothing!”
Madon was born and raised in Sydney to parents who’d emigrated from India. After attending McDonald College and the Victorian College of the Arts (from which she graduated with a musical theater degree) she had her breakthrough role in the 2021 sketch comedy series The Moth Effect, Amazon’s first scripted Australian Amazon Original series. She debuted as the lead of Heartbreak High a year later.
Outside of acting, Madon’s other passion is music. She released her debut single “Eulogy” three months ago, followed by her new “straight-down-the-middle pop” single “Blame Me.”
She’s also working on an EP, which she told Gay Times will be “mainly centered around my mental health.” Earlier this year, Madon spoke to The Feed about another recent revelation that altered her life — being diagnosed with ADHD: “one of the things that led to my low self-esteem [growing up] was being a person of colour in Australia, and the second one was growing up neurodivergent.” She felt “like an alien,” but embracing her diagnosis enabled her to get fully back into writing music again.
Welcome to the family Ayesha! You can read her geeking out over her love for Rina Sawayama and her songwriting process over at The Gay Times.
feature image by James Gourley/Getty Images for Netflix
Fun! She’s so good and I have been loving this series.