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 fo
