Much of what you need to know about the art that inspired John Early to become the artist he is today is somewhere in his directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret. The curry of connotations and reference ratatouille in his tale of a food influencer’s struggle with an eating disorder evokes the melodramas of multiple eras, from ‘50s woman’s films to ‘80s and ‘90s issue-oriented TV movies like Kate’s Secret (after which it was named) and Perfect Body. It is both hilarious and deathly serious, sometimes simultaneously. There’s a pinch of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie in the mother-daughter dynamic. The sound is modeled after what Early calls the “winkingly pornographic” sonic design of Paul Verhoeven movies like Showgirls and Starship Troopers. 

Early says that when he set out to write the film in early 2024, he envisioned making something “very handmade and ratty,” like John Waters’ 1974 classic Female Trouble. We are sharing a “Maddie’s-coded” lunch he’s brought of onigiri, milk tea, yuzu seltzer, and mochi in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square Park, just steps from his digs while he finishes the run of his off-Broadway play What We Did Before Our Moth Days. His buzzed head is covered with a protective layer of camel-toned peach fuzz, and a few inches below, he rocks a borderline translucent mustache that he grew for Moth Days, an adornment he concedes could be perceived as “slightly pervy.” “It does make me feel like a real gay person, having a mustache, instead of an imposter gay guy on the apps,” he says.

During our nearly two-hour conversation, he mentions Waters’ influence repeatedly. Early, 38, reflects that in his 20s, as he was getting his start as a stand-up comedian and releasing videos on the Internet, he felt “an equal desire to be both John Waters and Divine,” the filmmaker and his linebacker-sized, cross-dressing muse, who starred in most of Waters’ best-known films. “But I also was like, ‘Wouldn't it be nice if I was just Divine?’ Then I waited for a few years for a John Waters, and I was like, ‘It's not coming. It's not happening.”

And so, John Early became his own John Waters and his own Divine. 

The most distinguishing feature of Maddie’s Secret, which premiered to raves at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and hits theaters June 19, is that Early plays a woman. It may appear to be a gag, but the performance is nothing if not earnest. His physical transformation included a wig, padding, and a tuck (the latter of which he learned via YouTube in a church bathroom during filming), but he only considers it drag insofar as what Divine was doing in Polyester and Hairspray could be considered drag. That’s to say: it isn’t, really. Unlike in drag, the overt female impersonation ”is meant to slip away.” In other words, it’s not the text, but the subtext. As writer/director/star vehicles go, we haven’t seen something this outlandish since Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult romantic drama The Room.

We meet Maddie when she is a lowly dishwasher working for a food content company, too camera-shy to present the ingenious recipes she creates in her free time to the world like the cruel and confident creator (Claudia O’Doherty) whose plates she humbly cleans. When her supportive husband (Eric Rahill) convinces her to upload a cooking video, it goes viral overnight, jumpstarting her career. But soon, the pressures of the industry lead to a secret struggle with bulimia.  

Early feels it’s useful to confront the audience’s gender perceptions as Maddie hits the ground running. “I think there's something about me playing Maddie that allows people to suspend their disbelief,” he says. “If people can give themselves over to that illusion, then they will be able to give over to the [film’s] tonal extremes, which is something we're losing. There's a certain kind of expressiveness that is being bred out of culture.” 

That’s not for Early’s lack of trying. He has long played ridiculous characters who are prone to self-absorption and emotional explosions, like his breakout turn as the diabolical Elliott Goss on Search Party or, more recently, his multi-episode arc as the questionably heterosexual TV writer Josh on the final season of The Comeback. Maddie exists in contrast to those roles. She’s “a dork,” in Early’s estimation, and though she can be effusive and passionate, her story is full of quieter moments, like when she’s formulating a recipe during the opening credits as she jogs to work, inspired by the sights and smells of Los Angeles. For much of the film’s running time, Maddie is a woman on the verge. “You can only be screaming for so long before your voice gets hoarse,” says Early. “I don't want to be playing a raging narcissist for the rest of my life. I've done that a lot, and there was a crackling there. It was really cathartic for me to play a narcissist because I grew up a good Presbyterian boy, so that had real energy behind it.”

Early credits his work on Moth Days as making way for his current, gentler vibe. He and his castmates rehearsed on and off for two years in multi-week blocks, starting in early 2024. The show, which was written by Wallace Shawn and directed by his longtime collaborator André Gregory (together they wrote the 1981 arthouse hit My Dinner with André), consists of a series of monologues told by four characters, who reflect on life and love that’s been lost and found. Early’s role as the debaucherous, morally askew Tim earned him a rave in the New York Times, which noted that his “gifts as a chaotic comic make him a magnetic storyteller, capable of saying crazy things as if they’re reasonable.”

“I felt totally cracked open from the play,” says Early of the intensive rehearsal process, which led right into the filming of Maddie’s Secret in the winter of 2025 following a six-week Moth Days rehearsal stretch. His vision was to make something fast and cheap, and that he did, with a budget around $750,000. Juggling so many roles in a frugal production harried him—at one point toward the end of shooting, Early banged his head on a car door and didn’t realize he had blood running down his face as he continued going about his day. He filled the production with friends, like his ex Gordon Landenberger (who did the production design and appears in a small role); his former teacher at NYU, the Emmy-winning actor Kristen Johnston; and elusive chanteuse Sky Ferreira (who shows up in a brooding cameo).

His creative other half Kate Berlant, with whom Early starred in 2022’s sketch special Would It Kill You To Laugh? among many other projects, plays Deena, Maddie’s lesbian co-worker with a penchant for ruining straight girls’ lives who has her sights set on Maddie. Early says he directed Berlant to go bigger to compensate for his more subdued turn. “She's the funniest person I've ever met,” says Early. “When we first became friends, I couldn't believe she was someone my age and not some old diva that I worshiped.”  

Berlant says Early’s meticulous script and vision made filming a breeze, and that he was quite relaxed on set. But she did wonder what people would make of this “inherently strange movie.” “I have full confidence in John, but I did worry when he first told me, ‘I'm going to be playing a bulimic woman,’” Berlant recalls, anxious about what she calls the “carceral nature of the culture.” But early festival and critical response has been overwhelmingly positive, which Berlant says is a testament to Early’s craftsmanship. “It's not mean. I think that's the thing that really protects it.”

Though Early initially envisioned his protagonist as a gay guy, he quickly dropped that idea. “It made the movie feel more satirical, a little more black-hearted,” he explains. He centered his narrative in the food world because of his fascination with the current way food is commodified both online and in real life. His character is bulimic because, he explains, “I can't convincingly play an anorexic person.” Maddie’s Secret also comes from his real experience of having circles of close female friends from a young age. “When someone would get an eating disorder, I suddenly felt kind of kicked out,” he recalls. “I was confronted with my gender, like, ‘Oh, I'm too stupid to understand this.’”

Though it swings wildly from absurdity to earnestness, Maddie’s Secret is John Early’s open love letter. “I love movies because of women,” he says. “All the people I fell in love with as a child were women.”

Early has no immediate plans to return to the theater in the wake of his Moth Days run, which wrapped in May, but he’s excited for upcoming film projects like First Contact, a microbudget vampire indie from Leah Hennessey in which he will play a priest “with a secret, Da Vinci Code kind of history.” Shot on camcorder, it promises to achieve the shabby chic impression that Early strove for with Maddie’s Secret. 

While it may have begun as a labor of love rooted in his comedic path, Maddie’s Secret evolved into something much deeper. “As we were shooting, I was like, ‘Is this just totally sincere?’ I'm sitting there in a wig and boobs, and I'm like, “Is this just like literally not funny?” To be clear, it most definitely is. But Early pulled off a miracle in making the laughs coexist easily with the gut punches. “I thought I was doing some kind of crazy backyard sleepover genre experiment with my friends,” he says, “and then before I knew it, on some mysterious level, this was incredibly personal to me.”