Maitland Ward Crempie _verified_ May 2026
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. maitland ward crempie
Years later, at another convention, a young woman approached her table. She was shaking slightly, holding a Crempie poster. On the first day of shooting, she arrived
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
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
Years later, at another convention, a young woman approached her table. She was shaking slightly, holding a Crempie poster.
Maitland took a slow breath. Then she uncapped a silver Sharpie, signed the poster with a flourish, and wrote underneath: Be the crempie.
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.
“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.”
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.
