From Laughter to Tears, and Back Again: John Early and Maddie's "Secret"
Alex Lei reflects on John Early's internet origins, his complex understanding of comedy and melodrama, and how all three shaped his debut feature, "Maddie's Secret".
The “YouTuber-to-filmmaker” pipeline is becoming a viable pathway to Hollywood success in 2026, particularly in the horror genre. In some notable cases, like with movie reviewer Chris Stuckmann’s debut Shelby Oaks or gamer Mark Fischbach’s (aka “Markiplier” on YouTube) Iron Lung, non-filmmakers have leveraged enormous online followings into mainstream moviemaking success. But it’s the people who used YouTube as a proving ground for their no-budget projects — namely Backrooms director Kane Parsons and Obsession director Curry Barker — who have gained the most. Trades like Variety and Deadline might suggest this is a new phenomenon given their stunning financial success, but the discourse seems to have largely ignored the short-form video origins that have been integral to a number of rising comedians’ careers for as long as YouTube has existed.
First-time feature director and star of Maddie’s Secret, John Early, got his start there, too. His satirical sketches, made with his close friend Kate Berlant, were both testing grounds for their sensibilities and creative supplements to roles on the fringes of mainstream — from acting in higher-budget works to hosting their own comedy tours and specials. These sketches could be as simple as quick riffs between Early and Berlant shot by Dean Peterson (#BeachPaintingClub, SEX with John Early and Kate Berlant) or more intricate narratives, like the ones they did with Andrew DeYoung (Santa Monica, Rachel), which tie them into the broader rhizome of DIY filmmaking (DeYoung, too, had a mainstream breakout in 2024 with his feature debut Friendship).
One of Early’s notable steps into feature filmmaking came via Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions (2024), which he both produced and starred in. Stress Positions is a devious, deceptive, auto-fictional, peak-Pandemic comedy following Terry Goon (Early), a stressed out gay guy keeping strict quarantine in his ex-husband’s brownstone, while caring for his bedridden, male-model nephew, Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), and enduring the persistent encroachment by his brash friend Karla (Hammel). The film’s tone moves between the languidness of early COVID and domino-collapsing comedy, which is paired with incredibly strong, naturalistic (if stretched and stressed) performances by all of its leads.
While Maddie’s Secret marks a step up in budget and scale over Stress Positions, it’s more spiritually akin to Early’s micro- and ultra-low budget projects than the studio films he’s participated in. To this end, Maddie’s Secret uses its resources to emphasize the impact of its DIY roots; it’s the kind of project Early would have made regardless of budget. Reunion with Kate Berlant and John Early (directed by Peterson), a sketch centered around a tense reunion made with little more than a couple of chairs and a green screen, was later fleshed out in a similar sketch in their A24-produced special, Would It Kill You To Laugh? (directed by DeYoung). Fundamentally the same, both sketches seek to send up the emotional tenor of these dramatic, real-life reunion specials; the only difference being one had the budget to match the production values of the thing they were parodying.
True to Early’s sensibilities and internet origins, Maddie’s Secret starts as a satire of online cooking shows in the vein of Bon Appétit and their ilk, before incorporating the melodramatic elements of an ‘80s After School Special as the dramatic stakes increase. Maddie Ralph (Early) is a dishwasher at Gourmaybe, a cheekily named food content farm, with her best friend Deena (Berlant). Passionate about cooking but shy about her talents, Maddie only posts her own cooking content at the encouragement of her husband Jake (Eric Rahill). When Maddie’s first video suddenly goes viral, Maddie’s boss, Zach (Conner O’Malley), quickly thrusts her into the spotlight, putting her in direct competition with petty coworker and established celebrity chef, Emily (Claudia O’Doherty). Tensions flare even further when The Boar, a fictional equivalent of FX’s The Bear, comes to recruit a chef consultant for their new season. It’s among these conflicts that Early constructs the many layers of Maddie’s “secret.” We come to see that It’s not just Maddie’s hidden talent for cooking that surfaces, but also the stress-induced bulimia that returns just as her dreams start to come true.
Melodrama, when done poorly, can cast plot and performances in maudlin and silly light. When done well, emotion becomes bigger than life — the trick is getting the audience on its wavelength. A cinephile with a rolodex of references at his disposal — from Sirk, to Lubitsch, to Haynes — Early is almost certainly aware of this challenge and the latent tension of the genre. The strength he brings to this heightened narrative aesthetic is his stand-up comedy-honed command of audience expectation to work people into the pathos of his story on his own terms.
Maddie’s Secret starts with a series of winks, the most obvious of which is Early’s performance as Maddie in drag. In the same way John Waters used Divine, this is never acknowledged within the diegesis of the film. In tandem with strategically maximalist performances from Berlant (referencing Cluny Brown, “Maddie Ralph, when will you learn to stay in your place?”), Rahill (“Hello my beautiful wife”), and O’Malley (“Girls! Play nice, we’ve got content to make”), Early makes room for his underlying sincerity to come to the fore. The exaggerated performances help lay a foundation for the audience to connect with and care for the characters.
The film takes on a more grounded and somber tone after Maddie, weakened by her recurring bulimia, nearly dies during an intensely choreographed sequence at a queer movement class (Danny Scharer’s editing evokes everything from Fosse to Showgirls, the latter of which Early, Berlant, and Cole Escola meticulously recreated in 2013). Finally recognizing the severity of her eating disorder after weeks of ignoring it, Maddie agrees to enter a treatment program at the hospital. There, we see a whole strata women with eating disorders, characters both outrageous — like Julie (Vanessa Bayer), a woman in arrested development who suffers from compulsive exercise — and grounded, like a trio of anorexic girls played by real-life friends and collaborators Leah Hennessey, Emily Allan, and Ruby McCollister, who act as a check on Maddie’s air of superiority. Julie’s childlike naïveté and the girls’ barely contained vitriol for society’s unrealistic expectations for women’s bodies are serious thorns that threaten to deflate Maddie’s carefully manufactured ingénue persona. As a source of comedy and pathos, though, they help Maddie’s Secret reach toward its ultimate goal.
Maddie’s time at the in-patient treatment, while still quite funny, is characterized by a quiet seriousness that invokes Todd Haynes’ AIDS allegory Safe (1995). During a revelatory therapy session between Maddie and her mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson), Maddie finally voices memories of long-repressed childhood emotional and sexual abuse. For most of the film, Beverlee looms off-screen, hidden in the past, abstracted by reflections or mediated by phone calls, like in her introduction, where she denigrates Maddie’s newfound success as a content creator. When Early cuts to the other end of the line, all we see is Beverlee’s dark reflection in a TV screen, evoking the famous image of Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, her face reflected in the screen of her new television, the poster child of socially-induced, post-widowed loneliness. In Heaven, the television is a cage Cary desperately tries to escape; in Maddie’s Secret, Beverlee seems stubbornly content to rot.
In all these many ways, Maddie’s Secret achieves a delicate tonal balance. The harmonious marriage of satire and sincerity proves Early’s skill in front of and behind the camera. Given the talent evinced across his sketches on YouTube, to stand-up tours, to made-for-streaming variety specials, it’s perhaps no surprise that the same skillset translates to the feature film form. By integrating his untapped dramatic capabilities within this established comedic style — and aided by some extra money — Maddie’s Secret becomes the ultimate vehicle for Early’s fully realized sensibilities, a way to cry with his characters as much as we already laugh with them.
— Alex Lei is a writer, filmmaker, and programmer based in Baltimore. He is the nonfic editor at BRUISER.
I have only recently come to know John Early through Search Party and I suspect I will love anything else that he does. Looking forward to Maddie’s Secret!