Maitland Ward Crempie May 2026

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.

Years later, at another convention, a young woman approached her table. She was shaking slightly, holding a Crempie poster. maitland ward crempie

Maitland took a slow breath. Then she uncapped a silver Sharpie, signed the poster with a flourish, and wrote underneath: Be the crempie. The role required her to learn a few

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. The craft services table was a single bowl

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.

The film never went to Sundance. It didn’t get picked up by A24 or Netflix. But it played at a dozen festivals, won “Best Short Horror” at a tiny one in Ohio, and developed a cult following online. People wrote essays about its themes of unresolved love and literal consumption. Teenagers dressed as the crempie for Halloween. A bakery in Portland released a limited-edition tart called “The Maitland.”

“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.”