To laugh or to cry? It’s a question that feels a little too familiar of late — one confronted often while watching “Maddie’s Secret,” the debut as writer-director from comedian and performer John Early.
Playing the title role with an unnerving sincerity and startling sense of vulnerability, Early stars as Maddie Ralph, a young woman climbing the ranks as a Los Angeles food influencer while secretly hiding her struggle with bulimia.
Early’s performance is a truly remarkable highwire act, all the more so for the wig, padding and prosthetics he wears to play the character. Made in the earnest style of a disease-of-the-week television movie without ever tipping over into winking irony, the film is both funny and tender.
“That, to me, is Maddie’s true secret,” says Early, 38, on a recent video interview from the apartment he is renting in New York City while appearing onstage in Wallace Shawn’s new off-Broadway play “What We Did Before Our Moth Days.”
“The secret of the movie — the real twist of the movie — is not any kind of trope-y reveal,” Early says. “The twist is actually a tonal twist. What I hope is then that becomes funny: the sheer commitment to the stakes of it.
“At any given moment, you can experience it as totally sincere, you can absorb it genuinely and be moved by it,” Early continues, “or you can take a little break and step out of it and find it uproariously funny that we’re even doing this to begin with.”
John Early, front, and Eric Rahill in the movie “Maddie’s Secret.”
(Magnolia Pictures)
Early’s skillfully wrought psychodrama, which had its world premiere at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, is now the opening-night selection for this year’s Los Angeles Festival of Movies, playing Thursday at Eagle Rock’s Vidiots with members of the cast present for a Q&A, and then again on Friday at 2220 Arts + Archives in Historic Filipinotown.
“Maddie’s Secret,” which opens in theaters June 12, makes for a fitting kickoff for this year’s event. Though the programming includes movies from all over the world, organizers ended up leaning heavily into films made in Los Angeles.
“This year it really does feel like a homegrown festival,” said Sarah Winshall, LAFM’s co-founder and festival director. “What it ended up doing is making us think about L.A. as a small town as a result.”
“I think the movie is an incredible accomplishment,” said Micah Gottlieb, LAFM co-founder and artistic director. “It’s made by somebody who’s not just a great comedian but also is a cinephile, knows the history of cinema, is trying to make something that fits within that lineage, while also just making an all-out entertaining movie.”
“Maddie’s Secret” was shot in the same workaday, creative-class neighborhoods where LAFM unspools. (Maddie’s house in the movie is Early’s own home.) The actor and filmmaker describes it as a “very Echo Park, Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, Frogtown, Glassell Park, Highland Park, Los Feliz movie.”
The story is also rooted in Early’s own complicated feelings about the L.A. food scene.
“It’s completely born out of my time in L.A. and my initial shock when I was confronted with a burgeoning restaurant scene,” says Early, who grew up in Nashville and moved to L.A. from New York in 2016.
“Not to always be talking about millennials, but it seemed very much of my generation,” he says, “specifically these kinds of restaurants where the food is really expensive but you’re sitting on a milk crate, eating lots of Middle Eastern food made by white people. There was just something very funny about all of it to me, even though I completely also sincerely loved it and still do.”
The film’s supporting cast is drawn largely from Early’s own circle of friends, including his most frequent collaborator, the comedian and writer Kate Berlant, along with Conner O’Malley, Claudia O’Doherty, Eric Rahill and Vanessa Bayer. The film’s production designer Gordon Landenberger is his ex-boyfriend and Early is excited that a number of other key collaborators, including costume designers Kimme Aaberg and Izzy Heller and cinematographer Max Lakner, are working on a feature for the first time, just as he is as writer-director.
“I think I wanted to force myself at gunpoint into a place of innocence and naivete,” says Early. “I think this movie is a strange mutation of the camp tradition.”
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)
Berlant plays Maddie’s best friend in the film. She and Early have worked together on shorts, live performances and their 2022 Peacock special “Would It Kill You to Laugh?” The two always share what they are developing and so Berlant first heard about “Maddie’s Secret” when it was just percolating as an idea.
“It was a very wild proposition,” she recalls with a laugh while driving down L.A.’s Beverly Boulevard. “He’s like, ‘I’m going to play a woman who’s struggling with bulimia.’ I was like, ‘Good luck.’ I was astonished that he totally pulled it off and he’s such a true filmmaker. It was kind of miraculous.”
Berlant describes their shared sensibility, the ability to simultaneously play comedy and pathos, as a kind of freedom. “Just the underlying absurdity or joke really gives you the ability to go to these really intense emotional places,” she says. “It gives you the permission to go to places that otherwise would be too unbearably saccharin.”
For Early it was also a chance to fulfill his longtime desire to play an old-school ingénue.
“I think I wanted to force myself at gunpoint into a place of innocence and naivete,” says Early. “I think this movie is a strange mutation of the camp tradition.”
“I was astonished that he totally pulled it off and he’s such a true filmmaker,” says Kate Berlant, Early’s longtime collaborator. “It was kind of miraculous.”
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)
He references Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp” to say there are two kinds of camp humor, one that is unknowing and another that is knowing. It is near impossible now to genuinely create the first kind, but the process of making “Maddie’s Secret” was in a sense about being the second and striving for the first.
“In the age of the internet and in the kind of crumbling, depressing world we live in, it’s almost impossible to be the first kind of camp,” says Early, “to feel innocent and naive and to twirl. But obviously there is a part of me, there’s a part of all of us, that is very childlike and innocent and has hope. So I think this movie, it knows itself to be camp but it’s aching to be more like the first kind of camp. It’s aching to be pure and naive.”
Though it may be easy to place what Early is doing in the tradition of drag performers such as Divine’s work with filmmaker John Waters, to Early his performance in “Maddie’s Secret” sits outside of it.
“Drag is often obviously about a certain kind of extravagance and fabulousness and Maddie is very humble,” he says. “And so I don’t really see it as drag. It didn’t feel like drag doing it, whatever that means. It honestly just felt like acting to me.”
In dealing with the serious topic of bulimia, Early was careful never to make the eating disorder the joke. He points to a trio of TV movies — 1986’s “Kate’s Secret,” starring Meredith Baxter Birney; 1997’s “Perfect Body,” starring Amy Jo Johnson; and 1981’s “The Best Little Girl in the World,” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh — along with Lauren Greenfield’s 2006 documentary “Thin” as key influences on how he approached the film’s depiction of the illness. (Other non-bulimia influences include Alfred Hitchcock’s “Marnie,” Paul Verhoeven’s trashy “Showgirls” and Adrian Lyne’s “Flashdance.”)
“I don’t find bulimia itself funny,” says Early. “The genre of these movies — that’s what’s funny. It’s the emotional pitch of those movies and the way that they’re made and the acting style and the kind of moralistic quality while being totally pervy. All that was funny to me. And then also putting contemporary life — young, gentrified L.A. food-content influencer culture — putting all that through a melodrama-style filter, that was funny to me.”
While writing the screenplay, Early says he often found himself weeping, overtaken by the emotions of what he was creating. “I guess I’m not above the genre at all,” he admits.
But playing the part was another matter, having sold everyone involved in the production on a very specific tone and conception of what they would do together.
“I was like, ‘I am so stupid, I can’t believe I have put myself in this position,’” Early says, laughing at the memory. “I had set myself up to do the thing that I really had no proof that I could do, which is to play an almost Juliet kind of character who’s going through these extreme things. And I was the one that promised everyone that we would take it seriously. And then suddenly I was like ‘OK, well you have to do it. You actually have to do it.’”
Even if Early was uncertain in the moment, the result is undeniable: a dizzying, disarming blend of humor and emotion — and one of the year’s boldest performances.
DELTA Goodrem’s first album in half a decade is just around the corner.
The Australian singer, 41, has opened up to The Sun about the project – admitting fans won’t have long to wait.
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Delta Goodrem has revealed that she has just finished recording her first album in five yearsCredit: Shutterstock EditorialDelta performed a surprise pop-up gig in Camden to warm up for her upcoming Eurovision appearanceCredit: AP
Chatting ahead of a surprise pop set in Camden, London with Australian chocolatey biscuit Tim Tam, Delta said: “I have finished the new album.
“When Eurovision came up I was in the studio already as it was naturally time to create the new album.
“I am doing a new video next week when I am back in Aus again for the next song.
“That will be straight out the gate and the new album will be there straight away.”
Delta said: “This is, literally verbatim, all your fault. It is all on you — Bizarre started this.
“Your article went back to the Aussies who were like, ‘Do you want to do this?’ So thank you. I have a big job to do.”
Delta performed her Eurovision track Eclipse for the first time in the UKCredit: AP
Delta will head to Vienna this May to compete with her song Eclipse and it ticks every box, with an infectiously camp chorus and a complex piano bridge.
A beaming Delta explained: “From your article, people started reaching out.
“Then one of the songwriters, Jonas Myrin, who I wrote the song with, took a screengrab of the article and sent it to me saying, ‘Delta, if you ever go to Eurovision, I want to write the song with you’.
“He’s in Sweden. Sure enough he flew to Australia when I said I was doing it.
“Even the first question I got asked when doing my first Australian interview was, ‘We heard it all started from an article from the UK,’ and yes, it did.”
It’s been three years since Australia last qualified for the live final, which adds to the pressure on Delta, who has sold eight million records worldwide.
Delta added: “Of course I am nervous, but it’s so joyous and I am so excited to be a part of it.”
Delta, pictured with Bizarre’s Jack Hardwick, says her interview with The Sun last year sparked her Eurovision callCredit: Bizarre Team
Poverty can be and often is crushing. For Hermanos Espinoza — who are in the midst of promoting their debut studio album “Linaje,” released Friday — growing up in a family that struggled financially after a string of failed restaurants turned out to be the greatest motivator.
Since 2021, the quintet led by the sibling duo of Joel and Leonel Espinoza have steadily built an audience with their brand of new wave norteño, pairing the prominent sounds of the accordion and the bajo quinto with lyrics about making it big thanks to a combination of unrelenting working-class grit, familial love and faith.
Hermanos Espinoza were one of the most buzzed about bands at the 40th South by Southwest music festival, which took place earlier this month in Austin, Texas. At the De Los showcase — one of three appearances the band made during SXSW — the rooftop of the Mala Fama nightclub was at capacity well before the brothers set foot on stage, and a line to get in extended past the door.
“Y que c— su madre la pobreza,” lead vocalist and accordionist Joel Espinoza, 24, belted out from the stage, opening their set with their 2024 hit “Dios Por Delante.” The popular Mexicanism translates to “F— poverty.”
The crowd cheered and danced, letting loose on a late Sunday night.
“I saw my family go through so much because of money, because of poverty. They didn’t deserve it but I understand the world works in a certain way,” he would later tell De Los in a video call. “I just hated it.”
The dynamic singer delivered every lyric with his whole body as he frenetically tapped the buttons of his brightly colored accordion, doing his best to make the squeezebox sound like an electric guitar. The drum set and bajo quinto kept pace, making the set feel more like a rock show than a backyard kickback.
(Cat Cardenas / For De Los)
With “Linaje” — it translates to lineage, a term often associated with nobility and pedigree — the brothers are intent on sharing their hard-earned success with those they love most.
“Some people refer to ‘Linaje’ as royalty, or people who come from money, but for us, it’s the complete opposite,” said Joel. “Our family is hardworking and we wanted to give them credit too. To us, that’s royalty.”
The Espinoza brothers grew up in the South Texas city of McAllen, in the Rio Grande Valley, helping out at their family’s Mexican restaurants. They can still recall prepping food from the early morning hours to late at night. They say it was tedious work that made them disciplined, punctual and appreciative of the value of a hard-earned dollar.
“You see life through a different perspective,” said Leonel, who is 20 years-old.
(Cat Cardenas / For De Los)
The brothers say they brought that same work ethic in their pursuit of music; both were heavily involved in their school’s marching band as part of the drum line, which helped them master rhythmic timing, coordination and motor skills. In high school, Joel picked up the accordion — he describes playing the 49-key instrument as a “love-hate” situation — and Leonel the bajo quinto.
Their mother helped book their first gigs singing serenade covers. But by 2021, house party gigs had slowed down.
“I used to work with my dad back at his restaurant and one of those days I was just feeling really down, ready to give up on my dream of music, but he held me down,” said Joel.
It wouldn’t be long before all that hard work paid off. Hermanos Espinoza gained traction on YouTube and TikTok with their self-released tracks, “Prueba De Fuego” (2022) and the aforementioned “Dios Por Delante,” which describe leaving behind the treachery of poverty for a better life.
“People started tattooing ‘Dios Por Delante’ on their forearms and neck and that’s when we realized that this was more than music, it’s a movement,” Joel said of the impact of the latter song.
Resilience and faith remain at the core of “Linaje,” which was mixed and produced by Ernesto “Neto” Fernández, who has worked with the likes of Peso Pluma and Xavi.
The 15-track LP, a solid representative of the ever-evolving norteño sound coming from the Texas borderlands, begins with a blessing, “29:11.” The title refers to a Bible verse in the Book of Jeremiah: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
“A big part of this album was just letting go of trying to control everything,” said Joel. “I put it into [God’s] hands and we just let things flow.”
Money is the focus in the tracks like “La Moneda,” with Joel’s voice echoing through the backdrop as he proclaims that cash might change some tacky, incompetent chumps, but not him. Almost halfway through the set list is a hazy track, “No Puedo Amarte,” where the singer sours over an unresolved love; the crooning track is reminiscent of a twinkling sad sierreño genre, with an accordion alternating volumes between a bold tremolando and a silky legato.
Still, at its core, “Linaje” fundamentally underscores their grit in tracks like “Modelo V,” the first single under Double P Management that celebrates the journey that led them to success, which honors the lessons taught by their father.
“No matter all the adversities we face, the thing about my dad is that he’s always stayed true to himself and who he is,” says Joel. “That’s how we were raised and how we live day to day.”
Harvey Hind from Lancashire stars in EastEnders playing Arlo, a preschool boy who is registered blind, as his mum says she hopes it shows disabled children they can achieve anything
Paige Ingram and Casey Cooper-Fiske Press Association Senior Entertainment Reporter
00:29, 19 Mar 2026
Harvey Hind, from Clitheroe, Lancashire, who has made his acting debut on BBC One’s EastEnders(Image: Copyright remains with handout provider)
A mother has expressed her hope that her five year old deafblind son will “break down barriers” for disabled children following his appearance in an episode of EastEnders.
Harvey Hind, from Clitheroe, Lancashire, made his acting debut during Wednesday’s episode of the BBC One soap, portraying Arlo, a preschool boy who is registered blind.
His mother Kimberly said: “I hope Harvey featuring in EastEnders shows other disabled children, especially those who are deafblind, that they can achieve anything.” She added: “Harvey loves being in the spotlight but for us the most important thing will always be raising awareness and breaking down barriers so every disabled child gets the same opportunities as anyone else.
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“Harvey did amazingly at the filming, I’m so proud of him. There were four cameras on him but he took it all in his stride.”
During the episode, Arlo and his mother visit Lauren Branning and Peter Beale’s home, where Arlo plays with her son Jimmy, who was revealed to be blind in a storyline last year, with Arlo’s mother offering Lauren guidance on raising a blind child.
At around four weeks old, Harvey failed his newborn screening hearing test, and his mother spotted a flicker in his eye around the same time. The family arranged a private consultation and he was diagnosed as blind at three months old.
He navigates using a red-and-white striped cane, which is used by deafblind people, and communicates through BSL. He also wears cochlear implants which provide him with access to sound. Kimberly revealed she found his first two years challenging as she battled to connect with her son, and was forced to quit work to look after him as he grew increasingly distressed whilst attending a mainstream nursery.
Disability charity Sense ultimately provided the family with a specialist in supporting deafblind children, which Kimberly described as “lifesaving” for her. She added: “I was so anxious when I found out Harvey was deafblind, so his character’s storyline resonated with me a lot. I didn’t have any experience with disability and I kept imagining the worst-case scenarios.
“Luckily, with the support of organisations like Sense, Harvey is now a really happy child who is eager to learn, loves exploring and has a cheeky personality.”
Harvey has featured in the charity’s 2025 Christmas appeal and in TV news segments highlighting the difficulties encountered by disabled children within education.
The EastEnders episode featuring Harvey will broadcast on BBC One at 7.30pm on Wednesday.
