Chef's Kiss
The actor takes us inside his directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, a hilarious and surprisingly heartfelt story of a woman struggling with an eating disorder while trying to become a cooking-world star
In 2020, while the world was reeling from a global pandemic, there was only one thing that kept John Early calm: the Bon Appétit test kitchen.
A content studio run by the venerated food magazine, the kitchen was a hallmark of internet optimism and a harbinger of the current pivot-to-video media model. “It was a huge fixation of mine,” Early tells me on a bench in Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Square Park. “I was watching it in bed before going to sleep, not even to cook.”
The comedian, 38, best known for his role as the acerbic gay best friend Elliott Goss in HBO’s Search Party, chose our meeting place to take advantage of the balmy late-May weather and to say goodbye to the neighborhood. He recently finished his run in the off-Broadway play What We Did Before Our Moth Days, and spent the past several months living nearby. With the show ending, he’s heading back to Los Angeles, which, he says, has made him spend the past 72 hours “weeping uncontrollably” on this very bench. I’m distracted by a never-ending line of ants that have fixated on the wooden slats beneath us, but Early is looking at the sky, describing the “beautiful window” Bon App opened for him during the pandemic. “[Those videos] were very comforting to me.”
