{"id":257464,"date":"2026-04-08T11:15:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/257464\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T11:15:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:15:13","slug":"comedian-john-early-makes-his-directorial-debut-in-maddies-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/257464\/","title":{"rendered":"Comedian John Early makes his directorial debut in ‘Maddie’s Secret’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

To laugh or to cry? It\u2019s a question that feels a little too familiar of late \u2014 one confronted often while watching \u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret,\u201d the debut as writer-director from comedian and performer John Early<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Playing the title role with an unnerving sincerity and startling sense of vulnerability, Early stars as Maddie Ralph, a young woman climbing the ranks as a Los Angeles food influencer while secretly hiding her struggle with bulimia.<\/p>\n

Early\u2019s performance is a truly remarkable highwire act, all the more so for the wig, padding and prosthetics he wears to play the character. Made in the earnest style of a disease-of-the-week television movie without ever tipping over into winking irony, the film is both funny and tender.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat, to me, is Maddie\u2019s true secret,\u201d says Early, 38, on a recent video interview from the apartment he is renting in New York City while appearing onstage in Wallace Shawn\u2019s new off-Broadway play \u201cWhat We Did Before Our Moth Days.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe secret of the movie \u2014 the real twist of the movie \u2014 is not any kind of trope-y reveal,\u201d Early says. \u201cThe twist is actually a tonal twist. What I hope is then that becomes funny: the sheer commitment to the stakes of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt any given moment, you can experience it as totally sincere, you can absorb it genuinely and be moved by it,\u201d Early continues, \u201cor you can take a little break and step out of it and find it uproariously funny that we\u2019re even doing this to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

John Early, front, and Eric Rahill in the movie \u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Magnolia Pictures)<\/p>\n

Early\u2019s skillfully wrought psychodrama, which had its world premiere at last fall\u2019s Toronto International Film Festival, is now the opening-night selection for this year\u2019s Los Angeles Festival of Movies<\/a>, playing Thursday at Eagle Rock\u2019s Vidiots with members of the cast present for a Q&A, and then again on Friday at 2220 Arts + Archives in Historic Filipinotown.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret,\u201d which opens in theaters June 12, makes for a fitting kickoff for this year\u2019s event. Though the programming includes movies from all over the world, organizers ended up leaning heavily into films made in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis year it really does feel like a homegrown festival,\u201d said Sarah Winshall, LAFM\u2019s co-founder and festival director. \u201cWhat it ended up doing is making us think about L.A. as a small town as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the movie is an incredible accomplishment,\u201d said Micah Gottlieb, LAFM co-founder and artistic director. \u201cIt\u2019s made by somebody who\u2019s not just a great comedian but also is a cinephile, knows the history of cinema, is trying to make something that fits within that lineage, while also just making an all-out entertaining movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret\u201d was shot in the same workaday, creative-class neighborhoods where LAFM unspools. (Maddie\u2019s house in the movie is Early\u2019s own home.) The actor and filmmaker describes it as a \u201cvery Echo Park, Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, Frogtown, Glassell Park, Highland Park, Los Feliz movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story is also rooted in Early\u2019s own complicated feelings about the L.A. food scene.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s completely born out of my time in L.A. and my initial shock when I was confronted with a burgeoning restaurant scene,\u201d says Early, who grew up in Nashville and moved to L.A. from New York in 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot to always be talking about millennials, but it seemed very much of my generation,\u201d he says, \u201cspecifically these kinds of restaurants where the food is really expensive but you\u2019re sitting on a milk crate, eating lots of Middle Eastern food made by white people. There was just something very funny about all of it to me, even though I completely also sincerely loved it and still do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s supporting cast is drawn largely from Early\u2019s own circle of friends, including his most frequent collaborator, the comedian and writer Kate Berlant<\/a>, along with Conner O\u2019Malley, Claudia O\u2019Doherty, Eric Rahill and Vanessa Bayer. The film\u2019s production designer Gordon Landenberger is his ex-boyfriend and Early is excited that a number of other key collaborators, including costume designers Kimme Aaberg and Izzy Heller and cinematographer Max Lakner, are working on a feature for the first time, just as he is as writer-director.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

\u201cI think I wanted to force myself at gunpoint into a place of innocence and naivete,\u201d says Early. \u201cI think this movie is a strange mutation of the camp tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Justin Jun Lee \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

Berlant plays Maddie\u2019s best friend in the film. She and Early have worked together on shorts, live performances and their 2022 Peacock special \u201cWould It Kill You to Laugh?\u201d The two always share what they are developing and so Berlant first heard about \u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret\u201d when it was just percolating as an idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a very wild proposition,\u201d she recalls with a laugh while driving down L.A.\u2019s Beverly Boulevard. \u201cHe\u2019s like, \u2018I\u2019m going to play a woman who\u2019s struggling with bulimia.\u2019 I was like, \u2018Good luck.\u2019 I was astonished that he totally pulled it off and he\u2019s such a true filmmaker. It was kind of miraculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berlant describes their shared sensibility, the ability to simultaneously play comedy and pathos, as a kind of freedom. \u201cJust the underlying absurdity or joke really gives you the ability to go to these really intense emotional places,\u201d she says. \u201cIt gives you the permission to go to places that otherwise would be too unbearably saccharin.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Early it was also a chance to fulfill his longtime desire to play an old-school ing\u00e9nue.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I wanted to force myself at gunpoint into a place of innocence and naivete,\u201d says Early. \u201cI think this movie is a strange mutation of the camp tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

\u201cI was astonished that he totally pulled it off and he\u2019s such a true filmmaker,\u201d says Kate Berlant, Early\u2019s longtime collaborator. \u201cIt was kind of miraculous.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Justin Jun Lee \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n

He references Susan Sontag<\/a>\u2019s famous essay \u201cNotes on Camp\u201d to say there are two kinds of camp humor, one that is unknowing and another that is knowing. It is near impossible now to genuinely create the first kind, but the process of making \u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret\u201d was in a sense about being the second and striving for the first.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the age of the internet and in the kind of crumbling, depressing world we live in, it\u2019s almost impossible to be the first kind of camp,\u201d says Early, \u201cto feel innocent and naive and to twirl. But obviously there is a part of me, there\u2019s a part of all of us, that is very childlike and innocent and has hope. So I think this movie, it knows itself to be camp but it\u2019s aching to be more like the first kind of camp. It\u2019s aching to be pure and naive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though it may be easy to place what Early is doing in the tradition of drag performers such as Divine\u2019s work with filmmaker John Waters, to Early his performance in \u201cMaddie\u2019s Secret\u201d sits outside of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cDrag is often obviously about a certain kind of extravagance and fabulousness and Maddie is very humble,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd so I don\u2019t really see it as drag. It didn\u2019t feel like drag doing it, whatever that means. It honestly just felt like acting to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In dealing with the serious topic of bulimia, Early was careful never to make the eating disorder the joke. He points to a trio of TV movies \u2014 1986\u2019s \u201cKate\u2019s Secret,\u201d starring Meredith Baxter Birney; 1997\u2019s \u201cPerfect Body,\u201d starring Amy Jo Johnson; and 1981\u2019s \u201cThe Best Little Girl in the World,\u201d starring Jennifer Jason Leigh<\/a> \u2014 along with Lauren Greenfield\u2019s 2006 documentary \u201cThin\u201d as key influences on how he approached the film\u2019s depiction of the illness. (Other non-bulimia influences include Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s \u201cMarnie,\u201d Paul Verhoeven\u2019s trashy \u201cShowgirls\u201d<\/a> and Adrian Lyne\u2019s \u201cFlashdance.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t find bulimia itself funny,\u201d says Early. \u201cThe genre of these movies \u2014 that\u2019s what\u2019s funny. It\u2019s the emotional pitch of those movies and the way that they\u2019re made and the acting style and the kind of moralistic quality while being totally pervy. All that was funny to me. And then also putting contemporary life \u2014 young, gentrified L.A. food-content influencer culture \u2014 putting all that through a melodrama-style filter, that was funny to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

While writing the screenplay, Early says he often found himself weeping, overtaken by the emotions of what he was creating. \u201cI guess I\u2019m not above the genre at all,\u201d he admits.<\/p>\n

But playing the part was another matter, having sold everyone involved in the production on a very specific tone and conception of what they would do together.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was like, \u2018I am so stupid, I can\u2019t believe I have put myself in this position,\u2019\u201d Early says, laughing at the memory. \u201cI had set myself up to do the thing that I really had no proof that I could do, which is to play an almost Juliet kind of character who\u2019s going through these extreme things. And I was the one that promised everyone that we would take it seriously. And then suddenly I was like \u2018OK, well you have to do it. You actually have to do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if Early was uncertain in the moment, the result is undeniable: a dizzying, disarming blend of humor and emotion \u2014 and one of the year\u2019s boldest performances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To laugh or to cry? It\u2019s a question that feels a little too familiar of late \u2014 one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[113803,7375,22956,113802,1924,6195,2303,48,52,51,113804,47,50,49,63,65542,4287,8272,1557,26810,72],"class_list":{"0":"post-257464","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bulimia","9":"tag-camp","10":"tag-eagle-rock","11":"tag-early-star","12":"tag-film","13":"tag-kind","14":"tag-l-a","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-lafm","19":"tag-los-angeles","20":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","21":"tag-los-angeles-news","22":"tag-los-angeles-times","23":"tag-maddie","24":"tag-movie","25":"tag-secret","26":"tag-woman","27":"tag-world-premiere","28":"tag-year"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}