Comedian and actor John Early makes his screenwriting and directing debut with Maddie’s Secret, playing the titular sweet-natured woman whose new success as a viral chef unhappily coincides with a spike in self-harming behavior. That is the secret that begins to spill out as Maddie’s life spins out of her control. The film is a neat trick in a couple of ways: The queer comedian nails the part of a cis-gendered woman and as comedy and melodrama share the same space.
“The key to the movie’s artistic success was I let it be what it wanted to be at any given moment,” Early says during a Zoom call a few days before his appearance with the film at Frameline Film Fest on Thu/25. (The film opens in theaters Fri/26.)
“We took giant swings as an ensemble, trying to do what we could with our very limited budget and very tight schedule, just trying to find the most expressive shot we could and having the actors, myself included, throw ourselves into it emotionally. Then it was like, we’ll let the chips fall where they may, tonally, and we’ll see what happens.”
Partial inspiration for Maddie’s journey came from two made-for-TV movies, Kate’s Secret, a 1986 drama starring Meredith Baxter as a seemingly happy suburban wife and mother hiding the shame of bulimia, and Perfect Body (1997), in which Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers star Amy Jo Johnson plays an aspiring gymnast who falls into anorexia and bulimia to meet her weight goals.
Early describes the former as very adult, a little chilly and mysterious. The latter he remembers watching with his sister when they were kids, screaming with laughter and unable to take it seriously. Thirty years later, he looks back and can see why he found a film centered around a subject as serious as disordered eating so amusing: It was the clash of tones with a bubbly heroine, a simplistically devoted boyfriend, and an obsessed best friend.
Not only that but it was shot in a way that reminds Early of a Paul Verhoeven film. He is a huge fan of Showgirls, and Perfect Body also reminded him in its aggressive style of the director’s Starship Troopers. “I just realized that I could take this women’s picture-type TV-movie narrative, and I can inject it with a Paul Verhoeven kind of intensity or verve,” Early says.
Other influences on his storytelling included Bruce Wagner’s fiction, citing the writer of the novels I’m Losing You (1996) and Amputation (2025), and the screenplays of Paul Bartel’s Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989) and David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars (2014).
“Bruce Wagner writes about these of miserable parts of contemporary culture, like online culture and celebrity and tabloids and paparazzi, ruthless and scathing in the way that he portrays them,” Early says. “It’s disgusting, but it always ends up building to some sort of cosmic profound thing. I’m not saying my movie does that, but I was consciously trying to make a movie about this miserable phone-based job, and the content that we’re all inundated with—and trying to leave its origins of the phone and go to somewhere more cathartic and cinematic.”
Overlaying all of it is a kind of stardust. Early wanted to take the audience on a journey with Maddie and to do that, they needed to buy her, both as a character whose goodness stands out in a cynical world and as a woman. “I was always like, ‘She needs to be an angel, she needs to be glowing, and we need to light her and film in ways that feel like old Hollywood movies where they endow the lead actresses with these kinds of magical properties,’” Early says.
“I think it was actually quite essential, beyond my own narcissistic need, for whatever reason, that it be lit like that. I also thought that if Maddie was just kind of like glowing like a sweet little candle in the middle of this whole movie, people would buy into that illusion, then they’ll buy into the heightened style that’s all around Maddie, all the acting, the filmmaking, the intensity of the plot. To me, making her lovable and incandescent is the key to getting people into the movie, like holding their hands and kind of pulling them through this very stylized fairy tale. It was important to me that she be very real too.”
It was not always easy being Maddie. Building the illusion of John Early as Maddie Ralph was not just a matter of acting but of costuming, padding, and makeup. He even had his eyebrows permed and tinted to better portray his heroine. And at the end of every day’s shooting Early remembers being in such a rush to get out of Maddie’s bra that he would get stuck in it from trying to pull it off instead of unhooking it. As uncomfortable as the part could be, Early loves the character. He envisions Maddie’s Secret as the first in a series.
“The dream was always Maddie would be this kind of YA character, almost like Little House on the Prairie or something, with little chapters in her life,” Early says. “I have a couple of story arcs in my head for her, and I would love to do them… I want her to have these little adventures, and I want the adventures to be collected in a little three-disc box set and maybe there’s a locket inside alongside the DVDs. You open the locket and it’s Maddie’s picture. She has that quality, to me, of the girl you idolize, and you want to be. I clearly want to be her; I played her. I think she lends herself to that American Girl doll kind of mythology.”
MADDIE’S SECRET screens Thu/25 at Frameline at the Castro Theatre with John Early in attendance, and opens in theaters on Friday, June 26.
