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”.
