John Early’s Dumb, Big-Hearted Masterpiece

In February 2025, while directing his first feature film, Early found himself reviewing shot setups from the hair and makeup chair, where his team styled his custom lace front wig every morning. The look was much more demure than Vicky, Nomi, and Carrie’s assertive styles. Early was going for something piecey, romantic, and unselfconsciously messy. He wanted to look like a tomboy Juliet, with tendrils falling in her face and flyaways catching the breeze. “Archetypally ingénue,” he told me in May.

That movie, Maddie’s Secret, opened in theaters last week and has been hailed as an “exciting” directorial debut that “overflows with affection for everyone.” Early stars as Maddie Ralph, a bashful dishwasher at a Bon Appétit-style media brand (“Gourmaybe”) whose talent for cooking earns her a promotion to on-camera recipe developer. As the pressure of her new job ratchets up, Maddie struggles with the return of a childhood eating disorder, eventually leading to hospitalization and several months in an inpatient clinic. With Maddie’s Secret, Early has made one of the most original, tonally bewildering, and — somehow — funny films of 2026. It’s the kind of movie that you keep chewing on, wondering to yourself: What was that?

Early has been honing his comedic sensibility for years, in sketches posted to his YouTube channel; in his sultry, cabaret-style HBO Max special (John Early: Now More Than Ever); and in shows and movies like Search Party and Eternity. All comedians are performers, but Early, a former theater kid, is uniquely attuned to the idea of performance. His sketches and sets pinpoint the ways in which real life is full of play-acting and ill-concealed insecurity. In his HBO special, he compares Donald Trump’s locker room talk in the Access Hollywood tapes to that of a closeted gay tween trying, with trepidation, to convince his peers that he’s straight. While many stand-ups go onstage as themselves, more or less, Early tends to slip in and out of character. In the case of the closeted youth, his eyes grow shifty with self-consciousness and discomfort as he sinks into the role with finely tuned precision.

With his first full-length feature, Early has taken on the challenge of translating this dramatic-comedic style to a much larger stage. By design, however, it’s not what you’d call a big film. Before Early had even worked out the plot of Maddie’s Secret, he knew that he wanted to abide by two principles: fast and cheap.

“I wanted to work at a budget level where I wouldn’t have to wait for approval on things,” he said. “Had this movie been more expensive, it would have slowed down and it might not have its strange, handmade quality. It might have been bludgeoned into a kind of conformity.”

No such bludgeoning occurred. The idea for Maddie’s Secret crystallized in February 2024, and exactly one year later, Early and his team were in Los Angeles shooting in an abandoned hospital wing, a cast member’s bathroom, a warehouse. Fast and cheap led the writer-director to craft his movie in the lurid image of made-for-TV melodramas, surrounding his good-girl protagonist with lecherous bosses, bitchy coworkers, and a chain-smoking mother from hell. Writing at high speed resulted in dialogue that was “blunt and crude,” and it prevented him from overthinking the operatic levels of emotion that the script was careening towards.

“I want to be very clear: Me commenting on the crudeness of it does not mean that there is some other version of [Maddie’s Secret] that is super highbrow and intellectual. I can’t do that,” Early said. “This was an acceptance of my limitations and my own hulking stupidity. But instead of running away from that — or hating myself for that, which I certainly [have], at many moments of my life — it might actually be the secret strength of this movie, letting myself be” — here, his breath caught in a mock sob — “dumb and big-hearted.”

You have to be smart to make stupidity this precise and compelling, though. Early is a naturally curious person prone to going deep on his fixations, and Maddie’s Secret is a showcase for his talent at blending disparate sources of inspiration into a wholly original tone. (He gave Maddie this gift in the kitchen, too: “It’s a little Mexican, a little Filipino, a little, well, me!” she says of her spin on a vegetarian smashburger.) Early’s mood board included TV movies like Kate’s Secret and Death of a Cheerleader, John Waters’s Polyester, the Gen X dramedy Clockwatchers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, and the 1983 hit Flashdance.

He wrote the entire script while listening to the Isaac Hayes's Shaft soundtrack, which shaped the Maddie’s Secret score: “The Shaft theme has all these sunny, ’70s horns in it… I was imagining Maddie running and waving to people with those horns [in the background].”

Showgirls, however, was Early’s lodestar. “It operates at such a high extreme of expressiveness, and it does have a sense of humor, but it’s also dead serious. As a result, it’s tonally very mysterious,” he said of Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 erotic drama set in glittery, seedy Las Vegas. “People are still obsessed with: What of that tone was intentional, and what [is] a retroactive camp interpretation?”

Similarly, Early approached Maddie’s Secret as both a hard drama and a hard comedy. Occasionally the two modes exist in the same frame: As Maddie hides in a bathroom stall at work, her tense expression half-obscured by shadows as though she’s in a Hitchcock thriller, two coworkers chat about a FaceTime therapy app like they’re doing a podcast ad read. (“Does it help with executive functioning?” “100%.” “Okay, you’ve convinced me! I’ll get the app!”) This explains how Early was able to make a funny movie that deals with the serious issue of disordered eating. Life on the millennial content farm is often the butt of the joke, but Maddie never is. Early plays her with complete commitment and sincerity, channeling Elizabeth Berkley’s balls-to-the-wall performance as Nomi Malone.

Despite the tricky tonal footwork in Maddie’s Secret, Early’s team seemed to understand exactly what he was going for, in part because he was on camera, in that messy blonde wig, leading by example. “He wrote such a clear script,” said his longtime comedy collaborator Kate Berlant, who appears as Maddie’s best friend Deena. “When we got there, we were just executing. It never really felt like we had to ‘find something.’”

It helps that Maddie’s Secret is, in many ways, a movie made among friends — after all, that’s how you get things done fast. Berlant and Early have been tight for 14 years, as they recently told Drew Barrymore on her talk show. Ruby McCollister — who plays the most ferocious of Maddie’s rehab peers — met Early through Berlant. (As a middle schooler at a private school in Los Angeles, McCollister had been cast in a senior project written and directed by May December’s Samy Burch and featuring Berlant. “The coolest girls I had ever met in my entire life,” McCollister told me.) Rounding out the inpatient program’s trio of mean girls are Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey, who co-directed John Early: Now More Than Ever.

Claudia O’Doherty, who gives a delectable performance as Maddie’s workplace nemesis, met Early over a decade ago: He DM’d her on Twitter after they were both cast in the Netflix show Love, kicking off a string of dinner dates. It’s her bathroom that they used as a stand-in for Maddie’s. “I just had to make sure I wasn’t in my apartment that day,” she said. “But we were all so happy to do that sort of stuff, because it meant there was no interference and we got to make exactly the thing that John wanted to make.”

Early is a natural leader, O’Doherty told me. “He’s a very friendly, disarming person. That is part of his appeal generally, but it really works for him as a director because it means that he makes people feel very welcome and safe.” McCollister described him as the only person she has ever met who could plausibly win the American presidency if he chose to run. “John walks into a room, and everyone wants him to notice them,” she said. On set, McCollister added, he consistently made his actors feel like they were doing a great job: “If you didn’t entirely get it, we’d go again, immediately, so fast that you didn’t have time to think.”

Meanwhile, Early was personally reckoning with the challenges of directing and starring in one’s own film. “On a technical level, it was hell — it was utter hell,” he told me. The first day on set, they shot a scene in which Maddie jogs through the streets of Los Angeles on her way to work. This meant that Early was 90 feet away from video village, where his crew was clustered around the monitor. “I was watching them, these tiny people 90 feet away, making decisions without me. I was like, I’m directing this!” Early said, laughing. (It’s moments like these, he noted sagely, that give you no choice but to trust your collaborators.) After filming the more emotionally wrenching scenes in Maddie’s Secret, Early found himself waiting for the director to come up to him and gently thank him for his work. “And that wouldn't happen. Because I’m the director,” he said.

This spring, Early appeared in What We Did Before Our Moth Days, an off-Broadway play written by Wallace Shawn and directed by André Gregory. His only job was to act. It was a profound experience, he said, being able to fully give himself over to the performance. But while Early has often craved that kind of direction, it’s also clear that the hyper-specificity of his creative vision — the kaleidoscope of references, the tone, the wigs — requires a more hands-on form of authorship.

“I remember, in my early 20s, really feeling like, ‘I want to be Divine. Where’s my John Waters?’” Early told me. “And then, slowly, I was like, ‘Well, I might have to be my own John Waters.’”

Eliza Brooke is a freelance journalist. She is the author of The Scumbler, a weekly newsletter dedicated to movies, design, and creative people.