John Early Is Ready to Go There

There are two tacks for the contemporary performer facing the decline of classic genres of film and comedy. The first is distrust, hence the prevalence of a flat, over-it style that wouldn’t dare rise to the level of caring. The second is going full out, plunging into the vacuum with such enthusiasm that dormant modes are made odd and affecting again.

John Early, as anyone encountering his work soon apprehends, chooses the latter. He is an actor, a writer, and a performing artist in other ways—a singer, a dancer, a standup comedian—who’s embraced that plurality in self-assigned opportunities to exercise his talents. I don’t remember how I learned about “555,” the 2017 anthology on Vimeo created with the director Andrew DeYoung, written and acted alongside Early’s best friend and artistic—but not actual—spouse Kate Berlant. Across the short films, Early plays, among other roles, a smiling, fiendish mall pop act; the shy, offbeat child of an overbearing stage mom; and an extra in a makeup chair whose instruments, his face and his voice, are progressively hampered by prosthetics.

He shares with Berlant an exquisite comedic timbre, that of insecurity at its primal, human pitch, sourcing humor and discomfort from characters incapable of feigning a convincing detachment from egotism. (“555” ’s précis: “What happens when your dreams don’t answer your call?”) In a “Tonight Show” performance promoting the series, Early and Berlant—the duo has since become so familiar that you want to say “John and Kate”—play comedians on the rise whose basking gratitude for the opportunity runs out the clock, leaving them unable to perform their planned material. “We let down our communities, O.K.?” Early announces, briskly nodding.

The tonal medley within such performances has only been refined as Early moved from sketch experiments for the internet to streaming specials such as “Would It Kill You to Laugh?” (with Berlant; on Peacock) and “John Early: Now More Than Ever,” whose title houses just the sort of trite commonplace that Early, in standup form, loathes. “I think the only thing we were really taught as a generation is just to vamp,” he posits at one point in “Now More Than Ever,” bobbing side to side; but this is performance, not mere truth-telling, so the telling is the thing, the bobbing, the hair flips, pursed lips, and too-cutesy smiles.

“Now More Than Ever” opens on a sultry, studied rendition of “Oops (Oh My),” by Tweet, the R. & B. songstress. This work has overlapped with Early’s accumulation of memorable one- or two-offs in mainstream, juggernaut comedies spanning the days of “30 Rock” and “Broad City” to “I Think You Should Leave” and voice work in adult series such as “American Dad” and “Rick and Morty.” The greatest expansion of his cult renown arrived in 2016, with the perfect show “Search Party,” where Early plays Elliott Goss, a character who delivers truly bracing levels of gay narcissism. In 2024, Early starred in the film “Stress Positions,” the feature début of the writer-director Theda Hammel, as Terry, whose put-upon frazzle is made to be the world’s problem during the dog days of COVID.

Early has recently chafed at the relative continuity of his characters. Enter Tim, the son amid the quartet of “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” the latest collaboration from Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, that was mounted at the Greenwich House Theatre this past spring. The production—both the playful, despicable, and distressingly heterosexual role of Tim and the close-quartered and searching rehearsal process—was something of an epiphany for Early, who was concurrently working on another revelation, his directorial début, “Maddie’s Secret,” in theatres June 19th.

And thus enter also Maddie, the film’s glowing good girl, played by Early himself. Early, who is thirty-eight, is a self-professed Goody Two-Shoes who grew up gay and Presbyterian in Nashville, but greater influences on the work are found in Toni Collette and turn-of-century R. & B., as well as melodramas such as William A. Graham’s “Death of a Cheerleader” and Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls” that help give “Maddie’s Secret” its look, patter, and emotional register. Maddie, plucked from dishwasher obscurity for a life of food influencing, is a “full out” kind of girl. (An unbridled dance becomes principal to her story.) Her resolute brightness is shaded by an eating disorder—“dangerous territory” for a filmmaker, Early admits.

I saw “Maddie’s Secret” in April during the Chicago Critics Film Festival without a clue as to its plot—“a film by John Early” was enticement enough—and fellow Early enthusiasts will, I think, be surprised by the emotional admixture its exuberance inspires. Early has also surrounded himself with some of the funniest comedians working: Berlant, Conner O’Malley, Eric Rahill, Vanessa Bayer, Pat Regan, and the Def Comedy Jam legend Dominique Witten; yet laughter is one among many plausible responses to these performances.

On a drizzly day in New York, I met Early in Stuyvesant Square Park during the final week of “Moth Days.” I had seen the play the night before, seated next to the actress Julianne Moore, who unexpectedly squeezed in beside me. In the course of my conversation with Early, which has been edited and condensed, we discussed the waning expressiveness within contemporary culture, vomit, and going full out, in the dance studio and elsewhere.

I’m really glad that I got to see the play.

She was talking with Wallace Shawn, who was sitting behind me, and an usher told her, “Your seat is over there.” I had an extra seat, but my friend couldn’t come, so I was, like, “If you guys want to sit near each other, I can scoot over.” She was, like, “Oh, are you sure about that?” I was, like, “Am I sure I want to sit next to Julianne Moore?”

I was like, “Who’s her friend?” Then I was, like, “Wait.” I knew that you were coming, so I was, like, “Oh, my God.” That’s where I slowly put it together because I can see you-all.

I wondered whether you were actually looking at me. It’s the narcissism of being an audience member that you always think that the performers are watching you.

This is very intentional—we put light on the audience during the first two acts. It descends, and then by the third act it’s totally dark. Did you feel that?

Did you feel that you were lit a little bit and then—

Yes, that is totally intentional. It’s meant as a way to replicate the intimacy of the rehearsal process. We rehearsed the play for a year and a half before the run. We would rehearse in apartments around a table or in large armchairs. The play was never in a rehearsal space. It was rehearsed for a very, very long time in this very intimate way. I would be this far away [holds hands a few feet apart] from Wallace Shawn and André Gregory and they would be, like, “O.K. Let’s start.” Then I would fucking start the fucking play and then I would just deliver it like this.

The goal, once we moved into a bigger space—which was terrifying for all of us—was to put light on the audience so we could actually look at them and genuinely tell them the story. I actually feel like I’m making direct eye contact and I have a task, a very simple task of, like, “And then this is what happened and this is what happened.” Then the mixing is really, really delicate and complex. . . . Even if you’re in the balcony, it feels like we’re right here and we’re talking like this.

As you were describing the rehearsal process, I thought, Oh, does that inoculate you against the audience? But actually it sounds like the opposite, priming you for the intimacy.

Exactly. I feel much stronger emotionally because for the first month we were, all of us, going crazy. It was so scary because every audience . . . It’s a very mysterious show, and it’s received very differently every night. To quote André, “It’s not a Neil Simon play.” There are some laughs that are pretty regular, consistent. For the most part, it hits people so differently, as you might imagine.

I did overhear Wallace Shawn saying that last night was a laughy night.

It was, in a great way, and I thought the laughs were so unexpected and smart. I felt like it was a very intelligent audience. We were getting laughs we have never gotten. I was, like, “This is a shocking audience.” They’re totally clued into this subtext and they’re looking for the kind of irony of someone saying something but trying to bury it. I was just, like, “Oh, my God.” I felt so relaxed last night.

It’s one of those things where you’re, like, “It’s funny. Should I laugh?” I had a similar experience watching “Maddie’s Secret” for the first time in a room full of raucous laughter.

I know. I know. That thrills me. Despite being so different, “Moth Days” and “Maddie’s Secret” are inherently linked to me because I was writing the movie as we were rehearsing the play. I was leaving editing to rehearse and going back into editing and post-production. So it was always, like, play, movie, play, movie. It was crazy.

Working with Wally and André, the delicacy, the sensitivity, the kindness they showed me. They healed all of my acting-school wounds. They healed all of my various periods of disenchantment with theatre and acting. Working in this style with them, it’s cracked me open in a way. That might be a totally cheesy, actory thing to say, but in some ways it’s made me embrace the kind of inner cheesy actor that I’ve been running from for a very long time.

I don’t know. The easy answer that I’ve given before, but that I’m more and more suspicious of or confused about, is that I grew up around religion, but I grew up around Presbyterianism, which is not the most challenging denomination, meaning it wasn’t scary. People are always, like, “Oh, you poor thing.” They imagine a melodramatic childhood of a little gay boy in the South, and it wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t feel suspicious of religion. I guess what I felt suspicious of—there was kind of wishy-washiness to the church I grew up in, and that feels so . . .

I can see how there’s a way that commitment and cheesiness are linked. They are, right?

Yes. They go hand in hand. You have to accept your gooey center. There is a screaming child in all of us that has to actually enter society and behave. You have to train yourself to be more rational, and you layer all these things on top of your screaming child, your accomplishments, this sense of irony. I think being a creative person, being a writer, a director, they’ve done wonders for me because, if I were purely an actor, I don’t know what the fuck I would be doing. I don’t know how I would get roles.

I have created so much of what I’ve been able to do, but as a result I’ve maybe been a little condescending or dismissive of the actor in me. It was really shocking to do the play and to feel. It’s a very emotional play. There are stretches at the end that are hard for me to get through without crying.

That helped me give in to this totally, totally insane challenge that I created for myself with “Maddie’s Secret.” I knew “Maddie’s Secret” would require me to really go there. Then, before I knew it, I was on set. It was just happening. The emotion that the melodrama required was happening.

Melodrama will not work if you don’t go there. It mechanically cannot happen if everybody involved is not game.

Exactly. I was very clear from the beginning when I was talking to understandably nervous financiers, where I was, like, “I don’t want this to be some cold, gay genre experiment. The whole point of this entire thing is to make something that is full of feeling.”

I don’t want to use the S-word (sincerity), but I do feel like we’re in a moment of a lot of artists rethinking the irony thing. I want to ask about how you were conceiving of Maddie, the character, because not only is the movie genuine and melodramatic—she herself is.

Yes. And I am that, too. I think “irony,” “sincerity,” these are things that, like “camp,” are hard to pin down. There’s certainly irony in this movie. There’s certainly camp. But to me they were always integrated, the comedy and the drama and the emotion and the outrageousness of it. I never saw them as isolated components of this movie. I didn’t know if it would be successful in making people both laugh and cry, but that was the dream. I figured you could achieve that feeling by doing both a hard comedy and a hard drama simultaneously and not worrying about the tone. I certainly did not want it to be a dramedy. You know what I mean?

Another fraught generic term. Ironically because of their ingenuity, people and projects can magnetize these terms like “absurdity” and “alt” and “irony,” “camp.” These terms that circulate so much now, what is their interior?

I don’t have the grad-school tools to even understand what I’m doing on a theoretical level. That’s for other people to write about and figure out.

That’s the beauty of being an artist. You don’t have to tell people what you mean because it’s right there.

And yet it does feel like today there is a kind of gunpoint quality to being an artist where you constantly have to explain to people what your intentions are and what your references are. Working with Wally and André, I’ve been spending time with these people who just allow the mystery to exist. They don’t claim to understand it. They don’t claim to be authorities on what we’re doing. They let it emerge. That feels so generational.

No, because you have to write the statement of purpose.

Yes, the mission statement. Corporate directives where it’s, like, “We’re going to platform this marginalized voice and then their work has to be a perfectly calibrated example of what it means to tell this person’s story.” Then you lose all the mystery.

To me, what helps me understand this movie and why I made it is expressiveness. Through the various forces, a huge one of them being social media, there’s been a loss of expressiveness. I will sound like a boomer, but I just feel that there’s an acting style—it’s a disease. I especially see this with the lead girl [in so many films]. The new lead girl, the new ingénue, is very, like, “O.K.” She’s sardonic and she’s, like, “Yeah, that happened.”

She’s got to be seamless with the makeup ad and the jeans ad. It has to be the same girl.

Everything’s been flattened out. I’ve been looking out at the culture and feeling, like, Where are the Elizabeth Berkleys? Where are people’s voices? I mean, this drives me crazy with singing. Contemporary singing, it’s a tragedy. It’s all “ahh.” No—sing out, sing out. Risk.

I watched “Clockwatchers” the other night at Metrograph, and Toni Collette in that movie is very Maddie, the purity. Then she gets initiated into this group of more rebellious women. But when we were watching this scene in the theatre where she sees the psychic and the psychic says, “Do you want to change your destiny?” And Toni is, like, “I don’t know.” It’s so beautiful.

I heard people behind me go “Oomph,” and then the other half of the room started laughing. It was a perfect example of a movie that allows that kind of earnestness and sincere contemplation. I yearn for that as a viewer. It was very important to me that Maddie be dorky and not cool. I think there are people who see the logline of this movie of a food influencer and they think it’s going to be cynical.

Hopefully it feels like you’re Maddie when you’re watching. This is my dream.

It’s so bracing. When someone wants something so badly, like, in real life, it’s the scariest thing, but also ripe for comedy because the rigidity of their wanting is bound to lead to calamity.

Someone asked me recently what I hoped to say about eating disorders, about bulimia. I was, like, “Nothing. Oh, my God, nothing.” I’m underqualified. And that’s what’s funny, I guess, unintentionally, is that I chose an issues-based genre. I chose the issue of the week.

I think you evade perhaps the less convincing aspects of that trope with the fact that there’s never a solid or untroubled rationale for bulimia or any eating disorder in the film. It could be reflexive. It could be sensorial. It could be diet culture, thinness, beauty, whatever. I like that it resists. We are in a culture that is prone to psychologizing ourselves all the time, in which there is, like, the wound.

And the wound is the explanation for everything.

In “Maddie’s Secret,” there are both no wounds and wounds all over.

Everyone’s in so much pain in the movie. One thing that really, really moved me doing this was when I was editing and I was, like, “Oh, my God, I have made a movie where every single character has these big eyes.” Every single character has a moment. I’m very proud of this quality. Even Conner [O’Malley], who’s so grotesque in the movie, has moments where he seems like a little boy who’s, like, “Did I fuck up?” Kate [Berlant] has such a childlike innocence that’s always right there under the surface that she so beautifully tapped into for Deena. Everyone’s face is very full of feeling.

The people who know Conner’s work, and yours and Kate’s, are primed for laughter, but they’re not necessarily primed for that turn. By the time that you’re catching your breath from laughing, you almost want to take it back.

My dream was always that people are literally catching their breath from laughing. They’ve expelled themselves fully from enjoyment and the roller coaster of the movie that they’re in a state where emotion can come out.

Not to be too cute, but it’s like vomiting.

That’s one of the many things that surprised me about writing about bulimia. Vomiting itself is a very expressive, hysterical—in the Freudian sense—act. I was, like, “Damn, I really chose a good central thing for everything I’m trying to do.”

I was also thinking about the way that it is interlocked with the food influencing. Because vomiting is in some ways the greatest offense to gustatory pleasure. At least with shit, there’s the pleasure of a job well done. Whereas vomit undoes it.

Maddie’s such a good student and she’s such a good girl. I was living in the house where we shot the movie and trying to map out the first time she binges on camera. I was acting it because I also happened to be the lead actor in the movie and I was totally alone. If anyone saw footage of me, I would look completely crazy. This was one of the most beautiful parts of this process, and I really wonder if this could ever have happened to me if I hadn’t worked with Wally and André. I learned so much important stuff about the movie emotionally through acting, and I actually figured out some important ideas truly just through acting it out.

I was, like, “No, what is this? What is it? Why am I walking? Why am I compelled to walk slowly to the bathroom versus quickly, which would be smart of her, given that she’s trying to hide this from her husband and she should go quite quickly.” Then I was acting it out and I was, like, “Oh, it’s because she is choosing to do this. She knows that if she does this, if she reawakens the demons, she will begin a path to self-destruction and she wants to self-destruct.”

In that moment, I realized what the movie is all about. She has this good-girl angel armor that she’s built up. I think Maddie’s so strong. She had this horrible childhood and this very negligent mother who put her through hell. She’s worked so hard to make herself in opposition to her mother and then she’s realized that she’s a woman getting older, and that everyone in her life has this relationship to this armor and not her.

It’s unsustainable and requires too much repression, and she knows the only way out is to self-destruct. I learned just through walking down the hallway over and over again, and then I felt it. I felt what she was doing even though I’d already written it. I’d already written that scene and I had already written the whole movie. I was, like, “Acting is so cool.”

It’s material. It’s an emotional quality that I didn’t really believe in for a long time. I was kind of always, like, “Acting is fake.” I desired so much to be an actor, but, like, “It’s fake.” And now I’m, like, “No, it’s totally real. It’s channelling. It’s really cool.”

Everything you were saying reminds me of dance. When I would dance when I was younger . . . Don’t get too excited. I was never making it out of the studio.

Were you a competition dancer? What kind of vibe?

I was vaguely a studio kid—then I joined the high-school dance team. I remember my coach would have an aversion to us marking steps instead of going full out. She would say you have to feel it on your body. This is just my segue into wondering how the dance aspect of the film came about.

I was listening to the “Shaft” soundtrack almost ritualistically every time I would write the movie.

Yes, because I was going through a period of really being obsessed with Isaac Hayes, whom I really, really love, and he’s very inspiring to me on a live-performance level. The opening song to “Shaft” is incredibly emotional and it’s incredibly sunny. It has these horns that are optimistic and warm, and that is literally the birth of the tone of “Maddie’s Secret.” There’s one song called “Do Your Thing,” which is nineteen minutes long. It’s unbelievable and it’s really funky and sexy, and then it starts to spiral out of control and it gets very dark. I was listening to that song when I was just dancing alone, and I was, like, “God, I really wish there could be dance in this movie.” But I was, like, “But then it’s like ‘Austin Powers’ if there’s dance.” I love “Austin Powers,” but I was just, like, “I can’t”—the idea of putting dance in it felt too broad to me.

But I kept thinking about it. I was like, “Are you sure there’s no room for dance?” Then I imagined in this dark song. I literally imagined Kate—who was not yet cast—dancing to this song, and I was, like, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

I was, like, “She has to have this tragic lesbian best friend played by Kate.” It was cracking me up, frankly. I used to be very scared about getting in trouble for this, but it was making me laugh so hard, making queerness so dark, it being evil, almost, and Maddie being this cis girl who’s, like, “What?” I wanted there to be some hypnotic thing throughout the movie that pulls Maddie to the dark side. Then I realized that, as in all these disorder movies, there has to be a midpoint where her health is in danger, where she pushes herself too far and she has to be admitted to a treatment center, and I was, like, “Oh, my God, it can be a queer dance class.”

I was just, like, “Done, here we go. There’s dance and we’re not fucking kidding.”

To me, the dance is the mission statement of the movie, because it’s, like, “No, no, we’re doing it. We’re committing.”

Yes. I got a fucking legendary choreographer who I cannot believe is in this movie: Danielle Polanco. She’s in the “Get Me Bodied” music video. She’s in the Omarion video “Touch.” She choreographed Addison Ray. I took her out to dinner. I never met her, and I was, like, “When I say there’s no money. I’m not being cute.” She was, like, “You don’t have to worry. I like art.” Her favorite movie is “The Bad Seed.” She loves Old Hollywood, and so she totally got it.

I, like Maddie, like to exhaust myself, unfortunately. Kate and I learned the choreography the weekend before our last week. I was so tired at that point that I had banged my head on a car door and didn’t know. I was talking to someone and I had blood going down my face, and they were, like, “You’re bleeding.” I was, like, “What?” I was fully Maddie. I was gone. It was totally insane, but that was the spirit of Maddie and the movie.

It’s totally injected in. I just love the dancing so much. It’s trying. It’s watching people who want something really, really, really badly.

Dancing is a socially acceptable realm to try because you have to. When you try, something comes out. The beauty of the dance scene in the movie is that it seems innocent. It’s just moves. It’s just physical. But all this stuff incidentally comes out, all this emotion. It’s like a dream ballet in the middle of a musical. I was, like, “It’s long and everyone has to get behind this. I’m not joking. We’re going to do it. We’re going to do the Fosse-editing style. We’re going to fucking do it and on this fucking budget, which is nonexistent.” I’ve had friends for whom it’s the most emotional scene in the movie. I only ever saw it as an execution of a cinematic idea.

What are you going to do with your time next, unless that’s your own private information?

I told my friend, “I want to feel like a gay painter in the nineteen-thirties. I want to be in a shack.” I found this beautiful shack basically on the beach, and I’m literally going to read “Middlemarch.” I mean, who knows what’s going to happen, but I could do it.