8/11/2023 0 Comments Key and peele youtubeIf I was in an environment where I felt unsafe, my body would go into fight or flight and I would literally not be able to speak. And that stutter was a manifestation of my emotions. I’ve had speech therapy for a very long time because I had a really bad stutter as a kid. Q: Did you get this centeredness through support of family and friends?Ī: I think it was a combination of being a queer Black man who had a speech impediment that was reliant on his anxiety. And just giving people the knowledge that they can move, knowledgeable without fear and move with confidence. Being able to shed that light on people ‘hey, this actually a little bit easier than you thought or here’s something that you think you might have to worry about, but you shouldn’t,’ took away that fear. I’ve recently started supervising the development of TV shows, and it’s been so fulfilling for that reason. Q: You have a kind of centeredness that you could teach the next generation, have you thought about doing that?Ī: I recently did a free, online Master class for OTV because I’m obsessed with getting any information that gets new voices into the fold. That was that moment where I said this movie is gonna come out and no matter what, it already had legs that have affected people’s lives. creating something that has impact that is bigger than you are. And that for me was the first time I felt like I had a legacy. It was ‘this movie gave things to so many people.’ It became a part of life that had a bigger reach and impact than me writing a thing. My job was ‘I’m good at this, laugh so these people could get me a job.’ My art is for me and in that moment, “The Blackening” was no longer about me. I was never doing stand up like my job is to make you laugh. Q: You’ve been doing comedy for a while now, including stand up, you never thought your comedy was profound or outside yourself enough?Ī: Selfishly, I do comedy for myself. I go through ups and downs personally all the time but to create something that affects other people was very profound to me because I never saw it as that. I wrote a sketch in 2016 and to jump to this point and see the impact of that, I think that there is a lot to be asked around what that feeling feels like. They were like: ‘This film helped me get into the union, this helped me do this thing.’ Then it became this thing to really see the power of one choice that I made. I got to the part of the cast and crew screening and how that moment made the movie so much bigger than me because I got to talk to the crew about how this movie changed their lives. I thought that was such an interesting way to put it because she was like ‘you have to have a kind of delusional way of thinking about life to aim for something that you’ve never experienced or knew was possible.’ I was trying to remember what it was like, what I was going through: ‘this thing happened and I felt this way and this didn’t happen and I felt this way.’ Then I got emotional. a dream that came true and it took this amount of time. I did a screening in Alabama and a woman asked ‘how did you feel during this process?’ She wanted me to walk through my emotional journey going through the ups and downs of the film. Q: What is one question you wish someone would ask?Ī: It’s something that people have asked me and I just feel there should be a different way to ask it. I think that is the most exciting movement that the industry can go is by absorbing and adopting as many new voices as possible. I think it’s most important to work with my peers and people whose voices we have not heard. I’m really interested in working with similar people like Issa Rae and Mindy Kaling, people that have really solidified themselves in the zeitgeist as creators. Being able to submit myself as a genre-agnostic creator and do whatever they want is the goal. I say that I want my career to be like a marriage of Jordan Peele and Kenny Ortega because I also have a deep love for musicals. We’ve had a career that I thought has been very similar - from sketch to The Second City to now horror, it’s just been a lot of similarities. Of course, Jordan Peele, I loved him from the beginning.
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