Maitland Ward Crempie Direct
And Maitland herself? She kept acting. In adult films. In indie horrors. In a bizarre, one-woman show she wrote about growing up in a house where no one ever said the word “vagina.” She stopped waiting for permission. She stopped explaining herself. She became, against all odds, exactly who she wanted to be.
“I just wanted to say,” the young woman whispered, “that your career made me feel like I didn’t have to choose. That I could be complicated. That I could be everything at once.”
That night, wrapped in a canvas chair with her name spelled wrong on the back (“Maitland WARD” in duct tape), she scrolled through her phone. A message from her agent: Another mainstream producer passed. Said you were “too controversial.” A message from her mom: Saw you’re doing that little film. Proud of you, honey. A message from a former sitcom co-star she hadn’t spoken to in seven years: I finally watched some of your… work. You’re a better actor than I remembered. maitland ward crempie
On the first day of shooting, she arrived early, found the key grip untangling a C-stand, and helped him without being asked. She ran lines with the sound guy between takes. When the prosthetic “crempie” (a pulsating, custard-filled tart with an animatronic cherry that blinked) malfunctioned in the middle of a climactic scene, Maitland improvised a line about “dead man’s pudding” that made the entire crew laugh so hard Jules kept it in the final cut.
Crempie was the next logical step. Not because she wanted to leave adult behind—she didn’t—but because she wanted to remind everyone that she could do more than one thing. Horror had always loved her, and she had always loved horror. The grotesque, the campy, the genuinely unsettling. It was a more honest genre than drama, she thought. In horror, the monster always reveals itself. And Maitland herself
“Crempie,” she said aloud, testing the word like a new flavor on her tongue. It was the title of the project she’d been circling for months—a dark, absurdist comedy-horror short film about a pastry chef whose signature dessert brings the dead back to life, but only for seven minutes, and only if they answer one truthful question about why they left. The script had arrived via a producer she’d met at a horror convention, where she’d signed glossy 8x10s next to a guy who played a zombie in The Walking Dead and a woman who’d been murdered in three different CSI episodes.
Maitland took a slow breath. Then she uncapped a silver Sharpie, signed the poster with a flourish, and wrote underneath: Be the crempie. In indie horrors
The role required her to learn a few piping techniques, memorize a monologue about grief and meringue, and sit in a makeup chair for three hours to get the right “sugar-burn scars” on her forearms. It paid almost nothing. The director, a non-binary filmmaker named Jules who wore a different colored beret every day, had raised the budget on Kickstarter. The craft services table was a single bowl of trail mix and a six-pack of LaCroix.