John Early Thinks Internet Food is Weird

Prop styling by Andrea Bonin

Is there anything more delightful than John Early in a wig? In his directorial debut, Early, who also wrote the film, plays Maddie, a blonde naif who skyrockets to viral fame for recipes created in the test kitchen of GourMaybe, a fictional but winkingly all-too-familiar online content hub. And yet Maddie’s relationship with food is anything but healthy. With influencerdom comes a descent into bulimia, eventually landing her in a treatment center where she must tame her inner demons before she can repair her relationship with food. And yes, it’s a comedy. Ostensibly.

The movie, whose campy tone is borrowed from melodramatic after-school specials and delivered in Early’s signature deadpan, is a study in artifice. Maddie attempts to maintain a good-girl façade veiling dangerous inner turmoil, while picture-perfect recipe videos mask an unsettling desperation for fame.

We spoke to Early about his own complicated relationship with cooking, the oddly erotic food videos that plague his Instagram explore page, and the inspiration behind his equally earnest and satirical new film.

Tell us about how the script and story came together? Where did Maddie emerge from?

I wanted to play an ingenue—a kind of angel. I thought it would be interesting to take a very contemporary internet-y job, but the story of it exploded into this expressive, cinematic fairy tale. I very quickly landed at food content, also because—that’s me. I mean, I am Maddie. I am that well-behaved person obsessed with food. Then it was like, okay, Well, if I’m doing this contemporary melodrama thing, and she’s in food content, what’s the shadow side? I very quickly thought about eating disorder TV movies, which haunted my adolescence.

Maddie has a relationship with food that’s at times beautiful, but often quite sad. How does that map onto you?

Cooking for people is a way to take care of them. It's a way to share some part of yourself. It's also a way to control people. That's in a lot of the stuff that I make because I've been making stuff about food and dinner parties and hosting—for whatever reason—for so many years.

You know when you're at a dinner, you're like, why am I being held hostage? When I host dinner parties, I’m watching everyone take every bite, you know? I’m like “Oh, just try it with the aioli I made,” you know? I’m never relaxing.

I have my own relationship to food in LA and restaurant culture. Particularly now with this strange, excessive moment in food content. That came out in the movie.

You’re talking about how influencer food videos have a specific vibe?

Suddenly, my Instagram algorithm became this strange mix of food and perverse sexual content. My grid is, like, Turkish men getting their pecs greased up with oil, and then the other half is beautiful girls in Los Angeles emulsifying pasta in the pan. Then there's the merging of the two in the same video. There’s a sexual quality to the food videos, especially the sound effects.

There’s the slapping thing; people will slap the ingredient on the cutting board. Quick cuts. There's sandwiches being cut in half, turned vertically, put towards the camera. Squeezed juices are oozing out, right? Meat, layers of meat. There’s something incredibly sexual about it. It’s very bizarre. I wanted to capture this thing I was seeing.

You mentioned your relationship to food and restaurants culture—what do they bring up for you?

You walk into a restaurant, and the branding is so thorough and slick. Like, why are you selling merch? Sometimes I just wish it was simpler. Just trust that the food is good and that people don’t need an environment that feels so perfectly in line with the fonts they’re seeing on Instagram.

Are there other parts of you that shine through in Maddie?

So much of this movie is me taking these little kernels of truth from my life, and perverting them and stylizing them in this crazy way. I really relate to being a good girl. Both my parents are ordained Presbyterian ministers and I grew up with these Southern Protestant values of being a sweet person and being nice to people. I'm a good sport—people ask me to do stuff, I'll do it. I'm not great at saying no to things.

It's simultaneously fulfilling to help people and be a self-sacrificing, charitable person. It's also a way to hide. If you're always going, “Let me help you,” then it's like, well, “What do you need?”

What's so funny about this movie is I thought I was doing a genre experiment. I was doing satire, cultural commentary, whatever. And then, before I knew it, I was like, “This is embarrassingly personal.”

What happens to Maddie after the movie ends?

In the movie, Maddie goes through this process of self-destruction, deliberately or subconsciously. I tried to make it clear that, when she’s making food in the last 15 minutes or so, she is back in touch with the passion part of it. Sometimes it’s a sincere relationship to food, and sometimes it’s a tortured relationship to food. And I think that’s true about everyone. Their greatest gifts are their biggest curses.