The actor takes us inside his directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, a hilarious and surprisingly heartfelt story of a woman struggling with an eating disorder while trying to become a cooking-world star

In 2020, while the world was reeling from a global pandemic, there was only one thing that kept John Early calm: the Bon Appétit test kitchen. 

A content studio run by the venerated food magazine, the kitchen was a hallmark of internet optimism and a harbinger of the current pivot-to-video media model. “It was a huge fixation of mine,” Early tells me on a bench in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square Park. “I was watching it in bed before going to sleep, not even to cook.”

The comedian, 38, best known for his role as the acerbic gay best friend Elliott Goss in HBO’s Search Party, chose our meeting place to take advantage of the balmy late-May weather and to say goodbye to the neighborhood. He recently finished his run in the off-Broadway play What We Did Before Our Moth Days, and spent the past several months living nearby. With the show ending, he’s heading back to Los Angeles, which, he says, has made him spend the past 72 hours “weeping uncontrollably” on this very bench. I’m distracted by a never-ending line of ants that have fixated on the wooden slats beneath us, but Early is looking at the sky, describing the “beautiful window” Bon App opened for him during the pandemic. “[Those videos] were very comforting to me.” 

What shocked Early in the few years that followed was how quickly the online food world ditched that calming content for a psychosexual hellscape. “It’s so pornographic,” Early says of food content today. “There are low-angle videos of a girl emulsifying pasta. The sound is so sexual. The slapping of the meat, and the scraping of the crispy rice. I just couldn’t get away from a performance instinct. And with me, it always starts with an itch.” 

Enter Maddie’s Secret, Early’s directorial debut, which follows a chef at GourMaybe Test Kitchen whose rising place in the food-­influencer world clashes with her lifelong struggle with bulimia. She’s blond, beautiful, and a walking stereotype of a naive ingenue. Also, she’s played by Early himself. 

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Maddie’s Secret isn’t a drag film, although Early had to don a blond wig, breast prosthetics, and hip pads to take on the role. Instead, he plays Maddie believably as a woman. As she’s promoted from off-camera dishwasher to digital-series regular, her eating disorder makes an aggressive resurgence. As if that isn’t enough, she’s also juggling her overbearing sapphic best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant), her coddling husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), and a fight to be the next food curator for the hit dramedy The Boar (an unsubtle parody of The Bear). As these events unfold, Early’s earnestness blurs comedy and drama, to surprisingly heartfelt effect. Especially for someone whose millennial-specific brand of humor historically has been a bit biting, even occasionally mean.

“I tried [at first] to do this in the body of a gay guy, and this will absolutely say more about my own internalized homophobia than anything else, but it felt caustic,” Early says. “I feel a little more, as an artist, maternal. A little gentler. And once I accepted that, all of this feeling and color and style and cinematic expressiveness rushed into the whole enterprise.” 

It would be easy to call Maddie’s Secret a campy comedy, but that would strip the film of its essence. Early says that the movie takes much of its aesthetic and satirical cues from director Paul Verhoeven’s films Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997). Which means the more disoriented the audience is, the better. 

“I wanted people to be in a physical state where you’ve laughed so much that your lungs are open and you’re more ready to receive the emotion,” he says. “I’m proud that I’ve made [a] movie that creates tonal confusion.” 

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Behind the absurdity is a serious story about bulimia. “I was thinking about TV movies, where there’s a hysterical revelation of a secret,” he says. “If someone’s passion is making food, [an] eating disorder would be the opposite of that.” Still, he did his research. In addition to watching documentaries like Thin (2006) and reading the 1978 book The Best Little Girl in the World, Early spoke to a close friend who went to an inpatient treatment center for an eating disorder, which is where he got many of the real-world details, like Maddie and other patients being required to sing while in the bathroom to make clear to others that they weren’t purging. 

Amy Sedaris gifted him the 1982 Cherry Boone O’Neill memoir Starving for Attention. “She was like, ‘Tonally, it’s all in here,’ ” Early says. “It is a sensitive issue. But that’s what movies are for. Now, when you make something, you [almost] have to prove your caution. I’m not trying to teach anyone anything. The reason why it maybe feels like it was dealt with sensitively is because I actively tried not to be sensitive.” 

The film is a family affair, staffed almost entirely with Early’s close personal friends from the comedy world, like Berlant, Vanessa Bayer (Saturday Night Live), Conner O’Malley (I Think You Should Leave), and Kristen Johnston (3rd Rock From the Sun). Not only did they film in Early’s actual house, but the actor’s ex-boyfriend Gordon Landenberger worked as the movie’s production designer. 

“I’m always trying to hire my friends,” Early says. “But I also want to work with people who — like me, the director — don’t necessarily know what they’re doing. If we’re all pawing around in the dark a little bit, something potentially original could occur.” 

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There’s a lot going on in Maddie’s Secret. There’s the critique of online food content. There’s the exploration of the self-destructive nature of eating disorders. There’s the thrilling Single White Female element gleefully embodied by Berlant. There are panic attacks and queer cardio classes and shot after shot of steaming, oozing, overflowing plates of food. But if the core of the film is the race for self-discovery, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s learned more than Early. 

“I’ve spent a lot of time in my stand-up, in interviews, and in the stuff I’ve made poking fun at the [millennial] thing, and I actually feel quite tired of it,” he says. “Playing Maddie was both consciously and unconsciously a way of accepting that part of myself.”