Daisy Eagan knows what it’s like living in the spotlight. She’s the youngest actress ever to win a Tony Award, nabbing Best Featured Actress award for her portrayal as Mary in The Secret Garden on Broadway in 1991 when she was just 11. An acting career with appearances on more than a dozen TV shows, including The Mentalist, Good Trouble, and Girls, followed, having her bounce back between New York City and LA for years, but when she became a trailblazer behind the microphone of her wildly popular podcast, Strange and Unexplained, she was able to work from anywhere. Tired of the demands, high cost of living, and environmental threats of California living, Eagan sat down with her husband early in the pandemic to decide where they wanted to start a new chapter, and the answer was clear: Rhode Island.
“We were back in LA and the pandemic happened, and we were stuck in this tiny, little two-bedroom in the Valley, and we looked at the fire map, and the entire state was on fire and running out of water,” she recalls. “Our son was eight or nine at the time, and we just thought, if we stay here, we’re not going to have anything to leave to him.” Eagan says nothing was off the table. “We really looked at the entire globe, and asked, where would we go if we could go anywhere?” she explains. Once they decided to stay stateside, they weighed a number of different factors. “It was a confluence of politics, affordability, climate, food, and queer culture,” she says.
While she concedes she missed the sheer breadth of culinary diversity found in her former home cities, she’s been relishing in Rhode Island living. “Last night, I was washing dishes, and my husband and my son were out in the backyard, playing badminton without a net, and I was like, this was on the vision board in my head of being able to stand at my sink and look out and see my family and my dogs in my backyard,” Eagan muses.
When it came to podcasting, Eagan was already sprinting when the rest were just lacing up. Her debut series, Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan, launched in early 2021, quickly luring listeners for each episode’s deep dive into curious incidents ranging from scary and scintillating to the really weird and just plain macabre. A closer look at what really happened to Amelia Earhart, UFO encounters, Bigfoot, the infamous Cecil Hotel, crop circles, the Loch Ness Monster, Jack the Ripper and his victims, are just some topics she’s covered, as well as taking a closer look at missing persons cases, unsolved murders, weather phenomena, and interviews with people in the “strange and unexplained” stratosphere. Since its inception, the podcast series has amassed more than 30 million listens. The fifth season drops on June 5th.
Capitalizing on her podcasting success, Eagan added two more shows to her repertoire: a show recapping hit reality series Love is Blind with co-host actress/singer and well-known podcaster, Ellyn Marsh, and Dear Daisy, an advice show. At the end of last year, Eagan joined Pulitzer Prize winners Amber Hunt and Amanda Rossmann to launch Grab Bag Collab, a podcast network that defies convention by allowing their creators to keep ownership of their shows.
While it may seem like every celebrity, reality star, and everyday Janes have a podcast these days, Eagan says the medium is here to stay. “I think that’s important in any art that you make – people will listen, and you can still do it independently. It’s a ton of work, but it’s still possible.” But “independently” doesn’t mean alone. Eagan says making a podcast is much more challenging than it may seem, from research and writing to scripts, recording, and editing. With her new network, she, along with her partners, are making the platform more widely accessible. “I think a beautiful thing about Grab Bag, part of our philosophy is, you shouldn’t have to do things by yourself. We should have community, and we should have support.”
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