Alison Roman and John Early at a promotional event for Maddie’s Secret at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 14, 2026. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival.)

M any of the food scenes in Maddie’s Secret—the new movie about a reluctant food influencer, written, directed by, and starring comedian John Early—are filmed like sex scenes gone slightly wrong: A knife squeezes the soft brown flesh of a roasted eggplant into a cutting board; milk is gulped from a glass bottle with greedy, unsettling urgency. Arriving in theaters this Friday in New York, Maddie’s Secret borrows the lush visual language of food media as we know it, shooting close-ups and capturing the fetishized textures of meat, the promise of satisfaction, but drains it of the usual comfort, leaving something faintly rancid in the frame. Long before the plot, and Maddie, announce that anything is wrong, the images already know. 

We meet Maddie (played by Early in full drag, performing with breathy, deadpan sincerity) at the bottom of the masthead, washing dishes at GourMaybe, a barely disguised facsimile of Bon Appétit down to the Condé Nast name-check and a sleazy boss (Connor O’Malley), where she labors in cheerful obscurity beside her best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant). But not for long: Home from a long shift, she finds her husband has eaten nothing but candy in her absence and makes him a tortang talong—a Filipino eggplant omelet she pronounces, with total guilelessness, to have “major breakfasty vibes.” He films her and posts it online; as luck would have it, he’s a video editor. By morning, the video has amassed 600,000 views, and Maddie, who aspires to be the vegan Giada De Laurentiis, is immediately promoted to recipe developer and on-camera talent, to the visible displeasure of Emily (Claudia O’Doherty), GourMaybe’s reigning queen bee. The promotion is everything Maddie wanted, and that’s when the trouble starts. The sudden attention and scrutiny on her revives her childhood bulimia.

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