‘It goes so hard in both directions’: John Early and Kate Berlant on making you laugh and cry in new influencer satire

In his directorial debut Maddie’s Secret, Early plays a food influencer with bulimia in a wild flip on the modern melodrama

T hey 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.