They don’t make film heroines quite like Maddie Ralph any more. As the creation of comedian and actor John Early, the titular character of Maddie’s Secret is a bright-eyed ingenue who greets the day like the sun came out just for her, no matter that she’s trudging to her job as a dishwasher. Like the leading ladies of ’50s Women’s Pictures, she longs for something more than the hand she has been dealt: in her case, to share her gooey, crispy and umami-packed culinary creations with the world as a food influencer.
Early’s character is a loveable striver that you want to see win, even as an eating disorder threatens to get in the way of her dream. “I wanted to make a character that people feel very endeared to and protective of,” says Early a few weeks before the US release of Maddie’s Secret, his directorial debut. “There’s something moving to me about people thinking of Maddie as not me and as this other being.” At recent festival screenings, fans reacted to the character with the primal displays of affection you would normally expect at a Barefoot Contessa book signing. “People are like, Aw MADDIEEEEEE!” smiles Early.
I’m speaking on Zoom with Early and his long-time collaborator Kate Berlant, the actor and comedian who plays Maddie’s spicy lesbian best friend Deena in the film. After meeting in the Brooklyn comedy scene in the early 2010s, the duo have springboarded from making genius web skits like 2013’s Paris to scoring major acting gigs, with Berlant starring in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, while Early stole scenes in Search Party and A24 movie Eternity. Still, the pair always find their way back together, teaming up again for 2022’s uproarious Peacock special Would It Kill You to Laugh?
They’re calling in from separate US coasts today, but the zingy energy of their decade-plus working relationship is immediately visible through the screen. “Remember TrimSpa?” says Berlant. “Do you know what that is, Owen?” Early asks me. “It was literally speed.”
“Well, it was an over the counter diet pill that was made famous by Anna Nicole Smith,” Berlant continues. “She lost a thousand pounds and then was out of her mind presenting at the American Music Awards.” (The clip is truly wild.)
Like the creative forces working on it, Maddie’s Secret moves to a brilliantly singular tempo. Maddie about as worldly as a camp councillor and not always with the times – she is probably the last 30-something in Los Angeles to still go nuts over gentrified chili crisp – as she spends late nights over the stove cooking up versions of the fussy fusion cuisine you would find at an overpriced small plates restaurant. Desperate to escape a life spent scrubbing pots, she’s encouraged by her sexy husband Jake (Eric Rahill) as well as Berlant’s Deena to follow her dream to be the “vegetarian Nigella” and start posting videos online. As she begins to find viral fame, an old eating disorder raises its head as Maddie struggles to cope with the attention, leading her to disguise her bulimic purging as the morning sickness of an unexpected pregnancy.
There are few performers that could play Maddie, and even fewer that could nail the balance of creating a film that is at once a pointed influencer satire, a rosy melodrama as well as an affectionate tribute to normie girls everywhere. Early wholly disappears into the role, with humor triggered by the film’s send-up of retro movie tropes rather than the sight of a man in a dress.
“There was no version of this movie where I didn’t play her,” says Early of his character. “That’s why it’s fundamentally a little experimental, even though its aim is to totally be traditionally entertaining. I figured that if I played Maddie there would be this central magic trick that radiates out to the rest of the movie.”
Early has a way of casting that glow, which he’s brought to cameos in TV shows like Life & Beth and Girls5Eva as well as Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero video. He drew from old TV movies for the film’s soft-focus, melodrama-indebted style, and reels off niche titles like 1986’s Kate’s Secret (in which Meredith Baxter plays a housewife struggling with bulimia) and 1992’s The Secret Life of Mary-Margaret: Portrait of a Bulimic (led by Calista Flockhart) as inspirations. “They’re actually quite perverted,” says Early. “They present themselves as for the whole family to gather around and learn about the horrors of bulimia. But actually they’re shot in this lurid way: they’re sensationalistic and very bizarrely sexual.”
“It’s this very stilted, almost educational programming,” adds Berlant, as Early nods along. “All these things were considered trash or lowbrow in their time,” he says. “But compared to the streaming slop we have today, they look brilliant.”
Maddie’s Secret is refreshingly honest about the diet culture of the ’90s and how body image issues can linger with us despite living at a time where we are told that every body is beautiful – even if, to misquote Orwell, some are more beautiful than others. “Our moment seems so confused about weight right now, with the simultaneous body positivity movement and then Ozempic,” says Early. “But then we were shaped as children by diet culture. No one was critical about dieting.”
Growing up in LA, Berlant would sometimes take her parents’ Weight Watchers calorie counting device and hide it under her bed. “It was a toy to me,” she says. “And then I remember buying SlimFast at the drugstore and being like ‘I’m just going to have a SlimFast for lunch.’” She shakes her head at the absurdity. “I was 85 pounds. I was like a chicken!”
“I think the ways I’m self-conscious about my body and my weight are old school,” Early says. “In private you’re like, ‘I look bad. I feel fat.’ But then in public discourse now you’re not allowed to think those things. There’s a pose of radical self-acceptance that I certainly can’t live up to. There’s something very liberating actually about going to these older modes of the TV movie, where you could worry about not being thin.”
Maddie’s eating disorder is one of the few things that the film doesn’t play for laughs, as the film transitions from a zany comedy into an increasingly dramatic mode as Maddie is admitted to a treatment center after she collapses. “The best way for me to thread the needle is to not be concerned at all with threading the needle,” says Early of the film’s tonal shifts. “Like, it goes so hard in both directions to make things really funny and to also make things really tragic.”
Early thinks that worrying too much about blending genres can often result in “a weak middle ground like ‘the dramedy’” (which, as The Comeback’s Valerie Cherish once noted, is “a comedy without the laughs”). “I think a lot of [the comedy in Maddie’s Secret] comes from being in a tropey movie, but then you’re saying things like ‘Hulu.’ It feels like a classic melodrama, but with the language of today.”
More than anything else, laughs come from Early’s keenly-honed mannerisms: the inexplicably hilarious way that Maddie flips her hair while leaving a room, or mischievously savors a cheese pull of mozzarella sticks, or has a conniption fit when a meat cooler shows up at her door. Yet he also earns our empathy in the film’s second half as Maddie puts her health on the line for a career opportunity, and attempts to heal a long-simmering rift with her cruel mother.
Early filmed Maddie’s Secret around starring off-Broadway in What We Did Before Our Moth Days, an intense three-hour play written by Wallace Shawn in which Early play the wayward son of a dysfunctional family who may be in heaven or hell. He partly credits his emotionally intense performance in the film to the production. “It’s a very profound play and it was a very gentle process that allowed me to be more vulnerable in a way I’ve never been in previous work,” he says, “I felt very cracked open by that experience.”
His peers also inspire him. He has seen friends that he came up with in the comedy scene reach new heights, with Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! sweeping the Tonys and Berlant’s one-woman show Kate becoming a critical sensation. “I wasn’t so inspired by Cole because of any queer reason, to be blunt,” Early says. “It was purely artistically – seeing Cole make something so narratively precise and surprising with such dramatic integrity.”
It proved that there could be a pathway for a quietly-risk-taking film like Maddie’s Secret to thrive. “I was inspired by seeing it actually work in the culture,” Early says. “It really made me want to step it up.”
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Maddie’s Secret is out in the US on 19 June with UK and Australian release dates to be announced