EN
Maitland tucked her hair behind her ears. At forty-something, she looked less like the blue-eyed, wholesome girl next door from The Bold and the Beautiful and more like a woman who’d seen the machinery of fame from the inside and decided to throw a wrench into it. Her transition to adult films had been met with pearl-clutching headlines and late-night talk show jokes. But what the jokes missed was this: Maitland had never been more in control of her own image than the moment she started producing her own scenes, choosing her own collaborators, and owning her own masters.
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.
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.
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.
The young woman laughed. Maitland meant it.