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.

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. maitland ward crempie

Years later, at another convention, a young woman approached her table. She was shaking slightly, holding a Crempie poster. “Crempie,” she said aloud, testing the word like

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. And Maitland herself

Maitland took a slow breath. Then she uncapped a silver Sharpie, signed the poster with a flourish, and wrote underneath: Be the crempie.

“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.”

Maitland loved every second of it.