Drawing inspiration from the melodramatic made-for-television movies of his youth, John Early wrote, directed, and stars in Maddie’s Secret, a new quasi-comedy-drama with a credible premise: as a sparky young woman in Los Angeles pursues a career in food media, behind the scenes she is battling bulimia.

It’s important to state outright that as Maddie—who finds herself promoted from dishwasher to on-camera recipe developer at Gourmaybe, a Bon Appétit-inspired media company—Early is careful not to create a caricature. We aren’t meant to laugh at the gender performance, nor at her eating disorder. Millennial food culture, on the other hand—think gochujang cookies and oddly coupled fusion food trucks—is the frequent butt of the joke. In one scene, as Maddie throws an eggplant dish together, her supportive husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), begins casually filming her meal prep. Her reply elicited cackles from my theater: “I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I’m in post-production.”

Among the members of the remaining cast—who shepherd the story between the bounds of satire and heartfelt sincerity—are comedy superstars like Kate Berlant (playing Maddie’s coworker and best friend, Deena, who begins to question her priorities), Vanessa Bayer, Claudia O’Doherty, Conner O’Malley, and Pat Regan.

“To me, my movie is Freudian,” Early says of his directorial debut, “It has a love of Freud from someone who’s never read Freud.”

Early has long been a presence in the entertainment scene, co-creating the 2022 special Would It Kill You to Laugh? with his long-time friend and collaborator Berlant, playing Elliott in the dark comedy Search Party, and, earlier this year, starring as the perverted son Tim in Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days at the Greenwich House Theater. Ahead of the theatrical release of Maddie’s Secret—which marks his feature directorial debut—on June 19, Vogue sat down with Early in New York’s Stuyvesant Square to talk about writing and becoming Maddie, the abundance of films that influenced his work, and the pleasures of working with a bunch of his friends.

Vogue: Before we begin, I wanted to let you know that I know you take everyone to this park. I’ve heard that you do all your interviews here.

John Early: This has been the spot. I’m sorry.

It’s okay, but I’m onto you. Anyway, I was listening to the A24 podcast episode you did with Da’Vine Joy Randolph and you spoke about writing essentially your entire movie while on the set of Eternity. How did you actually conceive of this story?

Well, the kind of ethos of it started first—the kind of budget level and spirit of the whole thing. My friend Harris Mayersohn, who has produced work for Cole Escola and Conner O’Malley, two friends of mine who I also really admire artistically, made these very off-the-grid, somewhat self-funded, very low-budget guerrilla filmmaking projects. I was kind of desperate to do something like that. And so I was thinking from a place of cheapness. I knew that the virtues of this would be in its kind of handmade quality, and its kind of let’s-make-a-movie feeling. And I also wanted to work at a budget level where I could hire my friends who, like me, are amateurs.

Important to do!

So I brought this idea to Harris in February of 2024, and I was writing something that was a lot more adult and kind of serious. Then I saw this movie Death of a Cheerleader. It’s a TV movie from the ’90s with Tori Spelling and Kellie Martin and they were screening it in LA. And I was just like, oh, I need to drop everything and make something that is this fun! They were in the exact same predicament as me; they’re trying to make something that feels like a 1950s melodrama but they have no money to do it. They’re not shooting in the big studios and they have kind of amateur actors. But there’s a real clarity in the storytelling, and there’s obviously a kind of camp quality to it.

And from there, how did you find Maddie?

Very quickly I was like, okay, I want this to be contemporary life and I kinda wanted to be the ingénue, but I didn’t think of myself as a woman yet. I was like, I’m a gay guy. There was something funny to me about having kind of an ingénue energy but working in media. You get it?

I do get it.

Media felt funny to me. To make a movie that had a kind of old-school sensibility but was right now, that was making me laugh. And then I was like, what’s the job? Hello—food is so cinematic. And if I’m in this teen movie genre, what’s the lurid secret? If you’re a food content person, the shadow side of that is you have an eating disorder. It was very quick. At the same speed at which I’m explaining it now, it came together.

I hoped you might show up in a wig.

I have them [in New York], actually. I had them shipped here for promotional stuff.

But you shot a lot of it in LA?

We shot Maddie’s house in Silver Lake at my house, and that was a budgetary thing, so we could take as long as we wanted to get ready. And if we damaged something, we didn’t have to be worried about the owner of the house being mad at us. It would just be me mad at myself. And her aesthetic sort of had to be my aesthetic—she’s an exaggeration of my tastes and styles and the ways in which I’m hopelessly an East Side LA millennial.

I know that you have spoken about this, but you’ve talked about Clockwatchers as an influence on this work. I missed your recent Metrograph screening, but I watched it on my own time.

I would have gotten you in! But maybe it’s better to watch alone. It’s very sad.

I could totally see the influence. I also thought immediately of Girl, Interrupted and particularly the scenes from inside the institution, with Deena as sort of a Lisa—the troublemaker character—and Pat Regan as…Whoopi Goldberg? Are there a lot of source materials for Maddie’s Secret?

Thank you. I think [the film] achieves a unique tone because it is very brazenly a reference. It’s a pastiche of films. I’m referencing Showgirls. There’s this kind of satirical cultural commentary there. I’m referencing TV movies. But I think it could only achieve that kind of emotional intensity and sincerity and strange, mysterious vulnerability that it does because I didn’t realize I was doing it—like, because of the indirectness of its camp approach. Its primary reference is a movie called Kate’s Secret, about a bulimic housewife from the ’80s. And it’s got the cheap paperback Freud quality of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie—the whole mother-daughter thing. To me, my movie is Freudian. It has a love of Freud from someone who’s never read Freud. I worship Freud—never read a page!

Speaking of the references, tell me about the costuming of Maddie.

Toni Collette [in Clockwatchers] and her mousiness is very Maddie to me. Her costumes were modeled after Toni. A lettuce-edge tank…that was my favorite term that I learned from this movie, “lettuce-edge.” We were looking at old photos of Alicia Silverstone from the Clueless and Excess Baggage eras. And there was something kind of tomboy to me about Maddie. In my mythology of her, she’s from San Diego, so I imagined her growing up around mall skater culture and Delia’s.

Certainly. You mentioned earlier that when you were first dreaming up this idea, you didn’t see yourself, or this character, as being a woman. When that changed, did you have any hesitations about taking on the role? And what were the preparations for getting into Maddie’s body?

I’ll tell you the whole, nasty truth. The main reason she became a woman was when she was a gay guy in my imagination, it didn’t work. I almost don’t have to explain it. What was true about the character from the beginning was that she was an ingénue—brightness, optimism, naivety! And then when I tried to put that into a gay person working in media, it felt satirical and caustic and ironic. Now, that maybe says more about my own internalized homophobia than anything else, because why couldn’t you make a gay guy that’s sunny and optimistic? You know, you absolutely could. They exist. But I’ve always desired to play women in film. Over the years I’ve had characters that were women, and I was definitely hesitant. But once I yielded to that, I felt all this pleasure and color and expressiveness rush into the project.

And in terms of the transformation, the really beautiful thing was that it was just there. She just was there. The voice and even the emotion, bizarrely enough, were there. But yeah, it was lace-front human hair. I wanted her to look like a natural blonde and I wanted her to have a no-makeup look. She represents a new kind of perfection, which is a kind of messy, cute thing that people try to achieve on social media. But she’s not doing it in a contrived way. And I had quite large breasts.

Is it invasive if I ask your cup size?

I think it’s literally something insane, like triple F.

Wow.

It’s crazy because in order to create the right proportions, we had to go as big as possible. We used mastectomy patient inserts. We bought bras and these inserts that they sell to women who’ve had double mastectomies. And then I also had hip pads. And I had special tucking underwear. It really helped that she had drapey cardigans that could kind of hide some of the more inconvenient parts of my body. It was a fascinating sculptural thing we figured out very quickly with very cheap clothing.

This is a movie about food. Do you cook? Do you have knife skills?

I have no knife skills. I do love to cook.

And what’s your favorite thing to cook?

I love to cook pasta, like every other girl. I love emulsifying a sauce, you know?

And do you have a cookbook or are you on the websites?

I am hopelessly Maddie. I use Bon Appétit. I use the New York Times Cooking app. I’m on The Infatuation. I’m on Eater. It’s pathetic. But I am slowly starting to detach from recipes and kind of be able to throw something together. A little pantry pasta.

And lastly, I must ask, in the wake of Moth Days, would you play Mary in Oh, Mary! if they came knocking on your door?

Well, of course. That’s so sweet. I’m aching for more theater after this play.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.