Men's Health July 7, 2026 0 Comments

Uncover Maddie’s Hidden Secret That’s Shaking Up the Health World—You Won’t Believe What She’s Been Hiding!

Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes when a comedian known for sharp satire decides to step fully into the glow of vulnerability? John Early, famously fearless in his comedy chops, has taken a bold—and totally unexpected—turn in his directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret. Picture this: a happy-go-lucky amateur chef turned viral sensation grappling with a resurfacing eating disorder, all while trying to keep her world intact. It’s a heartfelt exploration wrapped in layers of wit, and Early brings Maddie to life with such care that you can’t help but be drawn in. But here’s a curveball—this transformation wasn’t just emotional; it was literal. From the discomfort of jogging in a bra to ditching trendy eyelash extensions to preserve Maddie’s timeless aura, the journey was full of surprises. And beneath the laughs and the quips? A powerful message about armor, beauty standards, and the messy, beautiful task of truly knowing oneself. Curious how Early balanced all this while keeping his own health in check? Let’s dive into the story that’s as much about resilience as it is about reinvention. LEARN MORE

11 min read

“WHEN MY PUBLICIST said ‘Men’s Health has come through,’ I was screaming,” John Early says on a recent Zoom call, effervescent even through the screen. “I kept telling my trainer, ‘I’m not doing it until they offer the cover, shirtless.’”

If you’re familiar, you probably know Early for his biting satire and deliciously toxic characters, but his latest endeavor, his directorial debut Maddie’s Secret, is strictly pure of heart. Early stars in the titular role of Maddie Ralph, a happy-go-lucky amateur chef whose overnight stardom as a viral food influencer becomes complicated by the resurgence of a long-dormant eating disorder, which she struggles to hide from her devoted husband Jake (Eric Rahill) and best friend Deena (Kate Berlant).

Early has played plenty of women throughout his career, from the time he cast himself as Chicklet in a stage production of Psycho Beach Party, to his denim-obsessed character Vicky with a V that has appeared in numerous sketches and stand-up performances over the years, to his take on Elizabeth Berkley’s Nomi in the iconic shot-for-shot Showgirls scene recreation he made with Berlant and Cole Escola in 2013.

But despite this extensive experience, Early’s transformation into Maddie nevertheless presented him with unexpected challenges. For example? “The bra. Jogging in a bra. Wearing a bra all day long,” he says. “I’ve played a lot of women, but I’ve never played a woman for a full month. I was shocked by the itchiness, sweating in a bra—all day long. I was like, wow, y’all. I would use both arms and rip it off of me at the end of the day because I really was like, I have to get out of this.”

In addition to adopting a vegan diet and working with a personal trainer for the first time, Early also worked closely with his hair and makeup team to develop the right look for Maddie. Early felt strongly the character should have a demure, classical radiance. A trip to get eyelash extensions in Koreatown left him in tears when he looked in the mirror and felt it betrayed Maddie’s personality. “To me, it looked like contemporary trend. And I was like, that is so not Maddie,” he explains. “Maddie is timeless and humble and angelic. I didn’t want her to feel like some girl who saw it on Instagram and went to get the thing. I went right back and got them removed an hour after getting them put on.”

As writer, director, and star, Early’s deep care for Maddie is the most essential ingredient in the film’s deceptively complex tonal recipe. There are plenty of laughs, to be sure—the deliberately over-blocked staging, Berlant’s balletically clownish physical comedy, the swipes at a certain popular restaurant-oriented TV series—but the jokes never come at the expense of Maddie or her condition. Early and his costars’ unwinking commitment to the story ensure the film’s funniest and most heartbreaking moments succeed in equal measure.

Although Maddie’s Secret is, in a classical sense, a “women’s picture,” the questions it raises about body image and beauty standards in the age of social media are relevant to anyone with a smartphone. Whether or not you’re among the third of all eating disorder sufferers who are male, with the popularity of weight loss medications, surgical cosmetic enhancements, black market biohacking—not to mention the whole looksmaxxing movement—it stands to reason that just about anyone could be harboring a secret like Maddie’s.

MEN’S HEALTH: You’ve been on an extensive press tour to promote the film, but I understand no one has asked you about your fitness regimen yet.

JOHN EARLY: It’s almost bizarre that no one’s acknowledging my physique, which has been so painstakingly maintained and created over the past few years. It’s bizarre that people tend to focus on the work.

MH: So how did you physically prepare for this role?

JE: It was very important to me that Maddie be this glowing, incandescent, flickering illusion at the center of the movie, so that people would immediately be enchanted and give themselves over to this kind of fairytale tone. I basically told every department head, “She’s an angel, and let’s just start there.” There are some times when she’s totally glowing, and that’s because of the lenses. We used these old Hollywood lenses and vintage lenses from the ’40s.

For myself, I had kind of vaguely heard that if you eat vegan, your skin will glow. And so [laughs] I did Sakara.

MH: Wow.

JE: Ariel, I did Sakara! I did the meal delivery service for six weeks leading up to the movie. I have a lot of fun and find it very pleasurable to think about what my next meal is going to be, but that takes a lot of time. To me, every meal is an incredible opportunity and I get so excited. When I start to feel a little faint hunger, I’m like, ’What are we going to do?’ But there’s no time for that shit. There was no time. It was just a fire hose of decision-making. Making the film was the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life. And so I was just like, ‘I’m going to do this meal delivery service.’ And it was pretty good? I mean, sort of. [Laughs] I did feel kind of brighter and healthier, and I do think it made my skin look better.

I also started seeing a personal trainer, Alexis Nieves, in L.A.. I remember being so scared of the first session. The only other time I had seen a personal trainer was when I was 20 years old and it was my friend who was a trainer at a gym, and I was like, ‘I should maybe try to do this,’ because I was going to be naked in a play. I’ve only seen trainers for career-based reasons. I’ve never done it for me. We did a little fitness test and literally within five minutes I threw up in what I thought was a trash can, but it was the towel bin, and they were so mad at me I just left in total shame.

The other time I tried to go to a gym was when I was doing Search Party and I was like, ‘I’m going to get a gym membership while I’m here.’ I had these cotton American Apparel shorts on and the very first thing I did was I got a little bar and I did a squat, and my pants ripped open, from stem to sternum. From cock to hole, it was literally a full rip. And I just put the bar down and I walked out of the gym.

So I’ve been so scared of gyms for so long. I’m always scared these people are going to think I’m such an idiot or something. So I sat down with this trainer and I was like, ‘He’s going to think I’m such a freak.’ I said, “I’m about to do a movie where I’m directing and acting in it,” and he was like, “Cool, cool.” And I was like, “I’m playing a girl.” And he was like, “Okay.” I was so scared of telling him that for some reason, but he was so sweet.

I told him the movie starts and ends with her jogging, so when I’m running on camera, I want to look like I can run. Like the way Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs is so athletic. For story reasons, I didn’t necessarily need to lose weight, but I wanted to be a little more alive.

MH: What about your skin care? Maddie definitely has a glow.

JE: I got a facial for the first time! I got an oxygen facial. I came out and was like, apple-cheeked. I looked so dewy. I looked fresh off of a farm, like a milkmaid. I was like, this is unbelievable. Also, I had to shave every day for the movie, which exfoliates my skin and makes me look like a baby. So that helped too.

MH: Why was it important that you be the one to play Maddie, and what did you enjoy most about inhabiting her?

JE: To me, the whole point of the movie is that I play her. It’s not like I wrote this script and then went, ‘You know what? Maybe it shouldn’t be Saoirse Ronan. Maybe I should play the part.’ The whole conceit started from the idea of me playing this kind of archetype and was built around that.

Because I’m playing her, there’s this razor’s edge thing where there’s always a potential for the movie to tip over into something more mocking or ironic or campy—in the hollow sense of camp, not the tenderhearted feeling of camp, to quote Susan Sontag. [An important] part of the movie is that the audience, whether they’re conscious of it or not, knows that that potential is always there. Leaning into the sincerity is fundamentally more meaningful when there is the option to not be sincere. So that’s why I think me playing it has a little more of a charge to it.

In Polyester, Divine plays this very pious, beleaguered housewife, but 10 years prior to that, she had been eating shit in Pink Flamingos, deep-throating dead fish in Female Trouble, and getting raped by a lobster in Multiple Maniacs. There was something very exciting about seeing Divine suddenly play a sweet, humble woman. I’m nowhere near as iconic or famous as Divine, but I have played a lot of psychos, narcissists, and bad people, and I thought that there was something exciting about me playing a really good person.

Embodying Maddie, I thought it would be more embarrassing to be as open-hearted and sweet as she is. I thought it was going to be cringey and that people would be like, ’Oh God.’ But it actually wasn’t like that. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. We all possess masculinity and femininity. It’s all in us.

I had these dreams of this being like a Mike Leigh movie, where we’re rehearsing for a year, but it was so cheap and so fast we just had to do it. And everyone was like, ‘You know how to do this. You don’t need to rehearse.’ And the second we started, [the character] was right there, and it was such a cool feeling. It felt like channeling or something. And the wig really helped.

MH: What would you say to guys who might think Maddie’s Secret isn’t relevant to them?

JE: I think it’s actually about someone who is very strong and has built up a certain kind of armor, and she’s realizing how much that armor is not serving her. It’s preventing her from having truthful relationships. The movie’s almost this fantasy of self-destruction, of getting rid of the armor and annihilating yourself and getting so out of control that maybe you can actually find out who you are and start anew.

I don’t think men, in terms of physical appearance or quote-unquote “health,” have ever been in such a consumer spiral as they are today. I mean, if you’re on this planet, obviously you are marketed to and you’ve undergone some sort of brainwashing to get you to buy things, but I think men, maybe for the first time, are experiencing this feeling that women have felt for a long time, which is the pressure to not look like what you normally look like and to change your physical appearance at all costs. I mean, the peptides of it all—which, I don’t know what a peptide is, but the peptides, the protein, the manosphere… It’s a strange time to be a man.

I think on a symbolic level, men might be attracted to this idea in the movie; the fantasy of what it would mean to drop the armor and let myself go and lose control. And then on a more superficial level, maybe now more than ever they can connect to these themes of self-consciousness about your appearance.

MH: The expressions of body dysmorphia that we see in men today are very extreme. Clavicular comes to mind.

JE: Have you seen the new images of him post-nose job? There’s all this stuff going around like, ‘Clavicular looks like he’s going to cry because he’s realizing the nose job isn’t great.’ His original nose that had character and was asymmetrical was, of course, sexier and more masculine. And now he looks, I don’t know. It’s very strange. It’s disturbing.

MH: At a certain point, the whole culture around wellness starts to feel very Julianne Moore in Safe, which is how I’ll segue into asking: has Todd Haynes seen Maddie’s Secret? It feels very in conversation with his films.

JE: Completely. It’s Safe. It’s also Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. And in the same way that Far From Heaven is overtly in conversation with Douglas Sirk, my movie is very much in conversation with an old TV movie called Kate’s Secret.

I don’t know if he’s seen it. I hope he doesn’t hate it. [Laughs] I hope he likes it. There are ways in which Maddie’s Secret is almost embarrassingly Todd Haynes, but I think at its heart, it’s actually more of a Paul Verhoeven movie. Todd Haynes is so refined and there’s something very delicate and mysterious and really internal about his movies. But I think Paul Verhoeven is more blunt and expressive and carnal and orgasmic—and that is what I was going for.

MH: You’ve also cited John Waters, Amy Sedaris, Alfred Hitchcock… If there was a Venn diagram, where would these influences overlap?

JE: I think that all of them in some way are interested in exposing the sinister underbelly of a kind of American moralism. Strangers with Candy is such a subversive show and has a profound influence on this movie. The whole conceit of riffing on a TV movie, I mean, that’s exactly what Strangers with Candy was doing. When I was writing the movie, Amy Sedaris gave me Cherry Boone O’Neill’s memoir about anorexia called Starving for Attention and was like, ‘The tone is all in here.’ It was so cool.

When I was watching these eating disorder TV movies that were presenting themselves as educational, something that was interesting to me was that they were like, “This week we’re going to sit American families down and learn about the horrors of bulimia,” and yet they’re so sensationalistic and even very sexually lurid and perverse. The main girls are so crazily sexualized to the point where it was funny to me. I was like, ‘This is insane.’ Especially when a lot of these eating disorder movies are about teenage girls.

Todd Haynes and Douglas Sirk are people interested in the constricting quality of societal norms and repression. John Waters is obviously punk. So yeah, I think that might be the throughline.

MH: Even at the film’s silliest moments, we genuinely care about Maddie and her disorder is never trivialized. It’s obvious through your writing, directing, and performance that you really love her. Can you talk about why?

JE: I wanted to create a character that people felt that they were allowed to love. That’s something I almost don’t feel anymore in movies. There’s a kind of obsession, which I think is a natural evolution of film and TV and theater, with the anti-hero. I’ve played a huge part in this; I have blood on my hands. I have certainly played a lot of flagrantly unlikable people. Some of my favorite, most formative works of art fall into this category. There are quote-unquote “unlikable characters” I have deep, deep love for and they make me weep. Kenny Powers makes me cry. But I’ve felt myself missing the permission to just fall in love with a character and not do these weird mental gymnastics.

I really love Maddie because in an increasingly cynical world, she is holding onto hope. I really admire her. I think she’s very strong. She’s overcome a lot. I also admire her bravery through the course of the movie, she is able to loosen her grip on her persona and let herself become more integrated. She transforms from a paper doll into a woman with ambivalence and ambiguity. She does some questionable things in this movie and hurts the people she loves, but in the end, she’s able to accept that in herself and accept that that is a natural part of life and she doesn’t have to keep painting over that part of herself.

And she’s a good cook! After years of avoiding the gym, John Early finally found a reason to go back.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ariel LeBeau is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist writing about film, TV, and pop culture. In addition to Men’s Health, her work can be found at Letterboxd, i-D, GQ, SSENSE, and more.