John Early: ‘There was electricity to playing a psycho – playing a nice guy almost felt self-serving’

There came a point where John Early had just played one too many lunatics. “I felt this thing happen over and over again where I was like… oh! People are scared of me.” Strangers would be on edge around him, he remembers. They’d be convinced he’d judge them, make fun of them, say something witheringly dismissive. It made him think about the work he was making. “Like what am I putting out into the world?”

The thing is, Early is really, really good at embodying the absolute pits of modern humanity. Historically, he’s specialised in gay millennial narcissism, paranoid vapidity, and a specific strain of faux-liberal, passive-aggressive ruthlessness. Search Party was its zenith. The cult mystery comedy series, a sort of Lena Dunham take on Agatha Christie, cast Early as Elliott, a tumor of a person who sells out his friends, lies about having cancer and pivots to becoming a right-wing talking head in exchange for money and adulation. Early was spectacular in it, just as he was in his episode of the Netflix sketch series The Characters, when he played a man sent into a horrifying tailspin when he learns that his nice, liberal, Obama-era gay wedding is being held on a plantation. Or in any one of his sketches with his comedy partner Kate Berlant, whether he was “man competing for attention at a funeral”, or “pass-agg actor whose face burnt off on the set of Ocean’s 14”.

“I grew up around this very progressive kind of Presbyterianism,” the 37-year-old says, fondly, of his early years in Nashville, Tennessee. “Our Church was like donuts, coffee, cheese grits and people gently teaching you stories from the Bible. So it was just more interesting to me to artistically be the opposite of that later on. To show my teeth a little bit. There was electricity to playing a psycho, and it felt almost grotesque to do the opposite. Playing a nice guy almost felt self-serving at that point.”

I meet Early in London, at the tail end of a fly-in visit to promote a romcom that he’s starring in, called Eternity. We’re in a room surrounded by cameras and publicists, which lends the conversation a slightly artificial air. Early is smart, articulate, and clearly interested in the less funny minutia of things that are funny – the hows and whys of delusion, irony, self-perception, self-aggrandisement, and what it is that makes them such interesting topics to poke and distort into sketches and jokes. But this is also a press junket, so Early – fledgling movie star in a big, glossy A24 film – is expected to dazzle. At points in conversation he turns away from me to one of the cameras that is filming him, winking at it, performing to it. Then, in a flash, he flips back.

Eternity stars Miles Teller as a man who chokes to death on a pretzel and wakes up in what resembles a heavenly airport terminal, where he is told he must choose one new world to spend his post-life life in. He waits for his wife Elizabeth Olsen to die too (both of these characters are elderly, I should add, but appear post-death at the age they felt happiest), only to discover that she has another dead paramour waiting for her in purgatory: Callum Turner, military dreamboat briefly married to Olsen’s character before he was killed in Korea. Anyway, in the midst of this very convoluted love triangle set-up, we also meet Teller and Olsen’s respective soul-ferriers, as played by The Holdovers Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Early. Both of them steal the show, lending gently spiky humour and glimmers of queer playfulness to what is generally a very heterosexual, monogamous movie: despite Early’s character being quite clearly coded as gay, he and Randolph are described as an on-again/off-again couple in the movie. I mean, it is eternity – why would you bother with any of those silly sexual hang-ups?

“We actually did a lot less than what was in the script,” Early says. “We were supposed to kiss, but on our last day of shooting, we were like… ‘we’re not doing that, right?’.” He laughs. “As sexually attracted as I am to Da’Vine,” he deadpans, “we just thought it would be too broad, and undercut some of the tenderness we’d found over the course of shooting.” Plus, he adds, “there’s something funnier about our characters just stating out of nowhere that they’re in love. Like tell, don’t show.”

He and Randolph bonded instantly, he thinks, based on their shared experience of being “consummate, flexible supporting actors”. It’s a position he has no problem with. The women he adored growing up were actors like Lisa Kudrow, Parker Posey and Toni Collette (as a pre-teen he even ran a Collette fansite), who often thrum along on the sidelines of comedies being weird and off-beat. “I’m not surprised that I ended up doing that kind of thing,” he says. “Whenever I was a romantic lead in plays in high school, I’d feel utterly limp. I had no idea what I was doing. But when I’d play a funny side character, it felt just much clearer to me.”

The slight secrecy of his fame folds into that, too – the work of Early, both apart from and with Berlant, tends to be whispered about among the young and internet literate, rather than shoved down our collective throats by representatives of Big Comedy. Early grew up loving once-maligned movies like Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and Showgirls (his eerily precise reenactment of a dance scene from the latter, alongside Berlant and the Broadway star Cole Escola, is a masterpiece), and recognises that often true greatness takes a while to catch on.

“They get reappraised 10 or 20 years later and become these cult hits,” he says. “And I was totally shaped by artists who were cult favourites, who were more niche. It makes sense that the work that I then make, and the work I gravitate towards, is a little bit secret. It’s also a very gay thing to do, too. We can see what’s special in the thing that gets ignored.”

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With Eternity, Early is properly flirting with a kind of mainstream attention that has often eluded him. The closest he’s come is arguably the music video for Taylor Swift’s “sexy baby” single “Anti-Hero” in 2022, in which he played one of an elderly Swift’s bickering, nefarious sons. “That was totally out of the realm of my daily life,” he remembers. “But once I got there, it just felt like a normal kind of job. And I only did it so my nieces would take me seriously.”

When I tell Early that I had earlier overheard a publicist telling another writer that Eternity will be a star-making role for him, he blushes and winces a little. He doesn’t seem convinced that it will be. But I also don’t know if he’d even want such a thing to happen. If Early has evolved out of the snide megalomania of his earlier Search Party persona, it doesn’t seem to be because he wants greater, safer fame. Instead he just grew tired of not being sincere about things.

“I think there’s been a generational affliction, with people my age and younger, of having spent a significant portion of our lives on the internet, and that resulting in our expressive vocabulary being so limited,” he says. “It’s like we’re walking around as a kind of Frankenstein of different tweets. It’s this poisonous, internet-bred irony that’s very stunting.”

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He’s therefore ridding himself of it. On his last stand-up tour, Early would tell stories in between entirely sincere musical performances, covering slinky pop and R&B acts from his childhood – Tweet’s “Oops (Oh My)”; Britney’s “Overprotected”; a wonderfully respectful and earnest rendition of the late Aaliyah’s “Rock the Boat”. And he’s written and directed a movie called Maddie’s Secret, in which he takes the leading – and female – role of a food influencer whose career break triggers her bulimia.

“I wanted to make something that didn’t have layers of artifice to it, or an ironic, knowing quality,” he says. “We just don’t have much today that’s really naive and open-hearted.” He thought a lot about it during Covid. “We were all having this traumatic experience, and I remember looking around and thinking, oh, we just don’t have a culture. We don’t really have music, or thinkers, or public intellectuals, or theatre to help us through this very dark thing. We have memes.”

“Not everything needs to have these shards of irony in them,” he continues. “So I made a movie in order to kind of hold a gun to my head and force me to make something pure. And as terrifying as that was, it also felt really good.”

‘Eternity’ is in cinemas; ‘Maddie’s Secret’ will be released next year