John Early on Directing His First Feature Film, ‘Maddie’s Secret’
Ahead of the theatrical release of “Maddie’s Secret” on June 19, Vogue sat down with Early 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.
Reported by Vogue.
There is a particular kind of film that only gets made when someone stops trying to make something important and starts trying to make something true. John Early's Maddie's Secret, out June 19, is exactly that — a low-budget, handmade quasi-comedy-drama about a young woman navigating food media, a secret eating disorder, and the specific absurdity of millennial LA culture. Early wrote it, directed it, and stars in it, in a lace-front blonde wig and, reportedly, triple-F prosthetic breasts.
The premise is sharp: Maddie climbs from dishwasher to on-camera recipe developer at Gourmaybe, a Bon Appétit-inspired media company, while quietly battling bulimia. According to Vogue, Early was deliberate about avoiding caricature — the joke is never on Maddie's gender or her disorder. The satire lands squarely on millennial food culture itself: gochujang cookies, fusion trucks, the creeping horror of your husband casually filming your dinner prep. "I just wanted to make my husband some dinner, and now I'm in post-production," Maddie deadpans — a line that, per the interview, got actual cackles in the theater.
Camp with a Conscience
Early has assembled a cast that reads like a group chat: Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, Claudia O'Doherty, Conner O'Malley, and Pat Regan all appear, keeping the film balanced between satire and genuine emotional weight. The whole project was conceived in a spirit of productive cheapness — Early shot at his own Silver Lake home, worked with producer Harris Mayersohn, and drew heavily from a specific canon of reference material: Clockwatchers, Showgirls, the 1990s TV movie Death of a Cheerleader, and an obscure 1980s film called Kate's Secret about a bulimic housewife. Maddie's wardrobe — lettuce-edge tanks, tomboy-adjacent silhouettes — was modeled after Toni Collette and early-era Alicia Silverstone. "It has a love of Freud from someone who's never read Freud," Early said of his own film, which feels like the most accurate possible description.
The decision to make Maddie a woman came late, and practically. When Early imagined the character as a gay man, the ingénue quality — brightness, optimism, sincerity — read as ironic. As a woman, it opened up. "Once I yielded to that, I felt all this pleasure and color and expressiveness rush into the project," he said. He's clear-eyed that this might reflect his own internalized biases as much as any narrative logic, which is, genuinely, a more honest answer than most filmmakers would give.
What Maddie's Secret seems to be, ultimately, is a film made by someone who loves the cheap, sincere, slightly-unhinged emotional directness of a certain era of women's storytelling — and decided the best way to honor it was to just become it.
Sometimes the most radical thing a filmmaker can do is make exactly the movie they wanted to watch.
Read the original at Vogue.
