Maitland Ward Crempie [exclusive] -

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.

Maitland Ward had spent the better part of two decades being told she was one thing: a soap opera star, then a sitcom mom, then a cautionary tale. But on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles, standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror in a borrowed studio loft, she decided she was finally something else entirely. maitland ward crempie

“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. The role required her to learn a few

Maitland loved every second of it.

Maitland smiled at the last one. Then she put the phone away, because Jules was calling “places,” and the crempie was about to rise again. The craft services table was a single bowl