Bleeding Hearts in Blonde Wigs: John Early on Maddie’s Secret

The film, which first premiered in 2025 at the Toronto International Film Festival, follows the titular Maddie (played by Early himself) as she navigates the dark and scary world of content creation while trying to maintain a perfect life, and keep a deep secret. 

With an open heart and a taste for tortang talong, Maddie embodies “the ingénue” in this modern melodrama, recalling the earnestness and off-the-wall qualities of films past. Situated somewhere between Instagram cooking videos and aerobic dance sequences, Maddie’s Secret serves its audience a healthy serving of absurdity and tenderness, satire and sentimentality–trusting them to try it all. 

Ahead of MNFF12, production intern Natalie Richardson-Wymore met with renaissance man John Early to discuss dying archetypes, sleepover-classics and connections to Middlebury, Vermont. Bon Appétit!

JE: The ingénue is an archetype. She is optimistic, naive and plucky – a kind, pure-hearted person. That’s who she is to me. And I feel like it’s a dying archetype. I think people find it anti-feminist or something. But if you remove the pressure of representing real life from your work, then she’s actually an incredibly helpful narrative device.

NRW: What are we, as a culture, missing out on without her?

JE: I find that when people bludgeon those qualities out of their lead characters, making them very world weary and jaded and self conscious, then everything bounces off of them. The events of those movies totally roll off their backs, you know? If your lead character is open-hearted and brimming with childlike innocence, then they can actually be affected by the circumstances of your movie. And maybe she’s not real, but also she is in all of us…we all have that yearning part of us, that achingly sincere part.  

The other thing, too, is that using her in a contemporary setting, it reveals how grim modern life is. If you have a character who already knows that, then the story doesn’t take off. But if you have a pure-hearted character who has to go into the dark, scary forest of the internet, then it’s more effective and I think it’s more moving. 

JE: It’s two things. In some ways, it’s a 1950s melodrama, with Sandra Dee or something. And then in other ways, it’s like very late 90s WB, like Katie Holmes, Felicity, Amy Jo Johnson. 

I’ve been kind of snapping into the Maddie voice and making myself laugh my whole life. And I just thought, “well, wouldn’t it be funny if I put that girl in contemporary life and made her say things like Condé Nast or a Hulu password?,” these really just depressing gray things from contemporary life. 

NRW: In your director’s statement you quote Susan Sontag’s On Camp, writing, “Camp is a tender feeling.” Maddie’s Secret is campy and hilarious, while also earnest and tender…could you speak to how you brought these feelings together in the film? 

JE: It was a genuine experiment. In the same scene, there would be things that were disgusting and tender and absurd and ironic and I just had a hunch that it could work. I had a feeling that if I just went “full out” with all of these things, then at a certain point the themes would integrate on their own.  

To me, Showgirls is an incredible example of that. It’s so over the top, and I say that as a compliment.  It’s so expressive, it’s unhinged. It’s careening and crude and disgusting but proudly so. And yet also there’s something so admirable in its persistence and its big-ness and…it’s not trying to be cool. 

That was a very conscious principle of mine in writing Maddie’s Secret. I didn’t want to be back on my heels, I didn’t want to be cool, I didn’t want to be guarded. I chose a character who was dorky and sincere and out of style. I wanted the style of the film to be very direct and open and not hiding behind pretension or “vibe” or ambiance.   

And Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, her performance is so committed and expressive and maybe elicits laughs in ways she probably didn’t intend. But also over time people have become very protective of her. I think people artistically understand the virtues of her performance and how moving it is, how brave it was that she threw herself into such a crazy movie. 

So I think the commitment was key in bringing all those individual elements together in Maddie’s Secret: the crudeness, the humor, the sincerity…and being like, “we’ll see.” We’ll let chips fall where they may tonally and I was so relieved watching footage back, realizing things were working, because it really was an experiment.

NRW: Does that freedom to experiment come from a trust in your audience? 

JE: Yes, this is very important to me. I think, right now, there’s a huge distrust that audiences are able to accept various tones existing in the same scene. I mean, as long as people in Hollywood are ruled by an algorithm, by data, they’re never going to trust the audience. 

And I knew this was going to happen. I’m not dumb. I knew that when I brought this script and this concept of me playing the lead girl, or of it being about a sensitive subject, I knew people might bristle at it. Or that people would be too scared to do it.

For example, despite the movie’s success, both for an indie of its size and also critically, we can’t, for the life of us, get international distribution. People keep saying, “Oh, the subject matter.” Or, “Oh, the tone.” I’m like, what more proof do you want? People love Maddie! They’re moved by the movie. It’s in every review–they all talk about the emotion, the tenderness. 

And that’s what’s beautiful about art, that you are taking a risk. You’re taking a big leap and trusting that the audience will understand your intentions. And it can’t be proven in advance. It’s a huge risk, and you go underground for a couple of years, living in the intensity of the risk and you come out and…hopefully people understand it. And in this case, when people were scared about certain elements of this concept, I was always just like, “you have to trust me. I love Maddie and I’m gonna protect her, don’t worry.”

To me, the most sensitive way you can approach a tough subject is not to lose your gumption as an artist. Like, if it suddenly had become very educational or cautious in the second half of the movie, if it had become timid, this movie would not work. The reason it works is because it’s just as cinematic and operatic as the beginning. 

And people have different reactions to it, but a lot of people get it. 

You gotta trust your audiences.  People can handle it. People can handle it. That’s the last I’ll say. People can handle it. 

You gotta trust your audiences.  People can handle it. People can handle it. That’s the last I’ll say. People can handle it.”

You’ve spoken a lot about how influenced you were by the made-for-TV movies of the 80s. Even the title, Maddie’s Secret is a riff on the 1986 film Kate’s Secret (another movie about a young woman’s struggle with bulimia). Why do you find them inspirational?

JE: Well, you know, I have to admit that the TV movies were more like raw material for the movie. They’re not as spiritually influential to me as Showgirls or Marnie.  Those are truly beautiful films.  

Now, my surprise in watching these TV movies was that I found them to be better than most contemporary movies…like on a filmmaking level. And I think the reason they’re so good is because of their limitations. They’re going for the feeling of a lush, American melodrama but without any of the budget that those filmmakers of the 50s had. They’re on a TV budget in the 80s or 90s, so they’re shooting on location, and the stories are tawdry and cheap and lurid. 

Most importantly, these movies are airing on national television. This is before Lifetime and Hallmark bought all these films and started rerunning them. When Kate’s Secret aired, it played on national television on Sunday night – seen by millions and millions of people. That is insane! Like, the family would gather around the TV and you all learn about bulimia.  

So they have a pressure on them, formally, to hook you immediately. To be very simple and direct in their storytelling, to be very emotionally clear…it’s not a place for ambiguity. So I was watching these movies and I was stunned by the ingenuity and the efficiency of the compositions, the emotional and narrative directness of them. And I wanted my movie to be very direct, very blunt. So, that’s what I take from them. 

NRW: How were you introduced to these films? What do they mean to you?

JE: These are the movies I watched as a kid with my sister and her friends and my girlfriends. This was at the time when, you know, they would be struggling with eating disorders, but they could laugh at these movies. We could watch it and they could laugh because they were so over the top. But also we were moved. Those movies moved us. There’s something very beautiful about Amy Jo Johnson’s performance in Perfect Body or Jennifer Jason Leigh’s in The Best Little Girl In The World or Meredith Baxter in Kate’s Secret – these bleeding heart performances. 

There is a part of Maddie’s Secret that’s a love letter to my girlfriends from adolescence. 

NRW: What would it mean to you if Maddie’s Secret became a slumber party movie?

JE: Well, I would be so thrilled. I mean, that’s how I fell in love with movies. 

Like, watching movies at that age with my friends, when we would feel like we had stumbled upon something nobody knew about, how thrilling that feeling was. Or watching something you weren’t allowed to watch – there were a lot of secret rentals going on at that time. Yeah, that would be so meaningful to me. 

Also, to be very clear, my movie aspires to be very traditionally entertaining. Like, for as weird as it is, I also want it to be propulsive and cathartic. I hope everyone loves this movie. I don’t want it to be super niche or to die in obscurity. But I do think it has a kind of secret camp language, like a secret code in it for…the girls and the gays. But yeah, it’s really for everyone.

I hope everyone loves this movie. I don’t want it to be super niche or to die in obscurity. But I do think it has a kind of secret camp language, like a secret code in it for…the girls and the gays. But yeah, it’s really for everyone.”

NRW: Lastly, I’m so curious…how did you land on the name Maddie? Where did that name come from?

JE: There was something almost tomboyish about Maddie. I always saw her as growing up in early 2000s San Diego, or what I think of as San Diego. To me, it’s surfers and skaters and stripmalls but like…Cali. I was imagining her wearing Delia’s, an almost Avril Lavigne style. I wanted her to have this cute tomboy name. 

Yeah, Maddie. It’s cute, it’s feminine but also approachable. It’s a name where people just love you immediately. It felt very specific. And it made sense to me.  

Before our conversation ended, Early commented on a moment that those of us at MNFF will certainly notice in the film – a direct reference to Middlebury, Vermont.  

JE: I have to address this because we’re here, and I’m sure people in the audience are going to be wondering why characters literally talk about Middlebury. 

Our production designer, Gordon Landenberger, who also plays Kyle, is from Williamsville, Vermont. So I ended up spending a lot of time in Vermont and his brother still lives there, in Weybridge… 

I wanted Jake, Maddie’s husband, to have this very Millennial obsession with authenticity and craftsmanship, with old things. There’s a millennial trend in loving classic American dark wood, kind of arts and crafts furniture. And so I was thinking about where Jake could’ve learned this, where he could’ve gone to school, and I landed on Middlebury.  

I also have noticed the people I know that went to Middlebury have an intense pride in the school. Like, in a way I almost never see at any other school, which is a good thing. So it felt sweet and funny for Jake to be proudly saying, “oh a buddy of mine from Middlebury…” Because I’ve heard that a lot. 

People really talk proudly about Middlebury.