The giant house Madea built
Filmmaker and actor Perry says goodbye to his favourite character and hello to Colin Powell
LOS ANGELES — Mabel “Madea” Simmons was never meant to be a phenomenon. Her creator, Tyler Perry, owes the success of the character in part to his mother and aunts, on whom she is based, but also to an actress who didn’t show up to perform a role in his play, I Can Do Bad All By Myself.
Perry recalls that night at the Regal Theater in Chicago.
“It was an actress with a hit song on the radio, and she didn’t show up. I was playing Madea, who was only supposed to be on stage for two minutes, but I ended up incorporating the lines from the other character and being on stage for the whole time.”
Perry is backstage at the 3,400-seat Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, where the writer/ actor/director/producer/ mogul has just completed a performance of Madea’s Farewell Play Tour to a raucous, sold-out crowd.
The tough-talking, gun-toting Madea has been good to Perry, who has played her in nine plays and 10 films that have grossed well over $500 million worldwide. With her help, he was able to launch his own production studio, Tyler Perry Studios, in Atlanta. Madea has been instrumental in transforming Perry into a mogul, one of the most reliably profitable filmmakers around.
He’s also friends with Oprah Winfrey, one of Perry’s earliest and biggest supporters.
Perry announced last year that this would be her final play and her final movie, A Madea Family Funeral, hitting theatres March 1.
“I just don’t want to be her age, playing her. I’m turning 50 and I just want to do different things,” he says, pointing to his recent performances as Colin Powell in Vice and in David Fincher’s Gone Girl.
“I had so much fun, I’m going to be looking at more roles like that.”
Vice writer-director Adam McKay admits Perry wasn’t the first person who sprang to mind when casting for Powell in Vice when his agent, co-CEO of WME Ari Emanuel, suggested it.
“I was open to meeting him because of his work in Gone Girl, but I didn’t expect it to be so immediate,” McKay recalls. “He’s just not what you expect. He walks in and is so commanding; he has such gravitas. And then talking to him, you realize what a smart, clever person he is. After he left I said, ‘That’s it. We have our Colin Powell.’”
Perry says he “never dreamed” of playing Powell.
“The first thing I did was call him because there are very few living African-American heroes and he’s one, and I wanted to be sure this would honour him. He was so gracious on the phone. He sent me his book, I sent him mine, he texts me now and then.”
His success is all the more impressive considering, in his own words, “Hollywood wanted nothing to do with me.” It took him some time to get started — his first play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, was an extremely personal story for Perry, who is open about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. And Perry continued to put the play up every year, for seven years, before it hit big in 1998. What changed in that time?
“I think, spiritually, I’d gotten to a better place in my life. It was about adult survivors of child abuse who have forgiven their abusers and I hadn’t forgiven my father. Once I forgave him, the show took off.”
Perry and his subsequent shows became a sensation on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” venues popular to African-American audiences. He was touring all over the country with his 2001 play Diary of a Mad Black Woman and while in L.A. he began to take meetings about a film adaptation.
“And every time they said, ‘Nope, we don’t want this,’” he reveals. “This is the one that got me: a white man at one of the big studios sat behind his desk and said to me, ‘Black people who go to church don’t go to movies, so this will never work.’”
Perry came up with the $5.5 million budget on his own and filmed Diary of a Mad Black Woman. It opened to little fanfare in February 2005, where it grossed over $20 million on its opening weekend.
Perry’s output since has been nothing short of miraculous; he writes, directs, and produces three shows on the OWN Network and since 1998 has written/directed at least one play and at least one movie a year. He signed a deal with Viacom in 2017 to produce 90 episodes of original content for BET.
“All parts of my brain are working all the time,” he says. “I don’t even understand how to not do it. I don’t know how to go halfway. I’m all in.”
He also works fast, often writing 22 episodes of a show in two weeks or filming 70 pages of a script in one day.
“I know this is foreign to a lot of people. It just works for me.”
As for critical reception, Perry says he learned long ago not to care.
“Let me tell you what happened in this very theatre,” he says. “I had two critics who sat in the exact same row and watched Madea Goes to Jail. They both saw the same play, they both gave very different reviews. One talked about how amazing and wonderful it was, the other said it was the worst thing he had ever seen.”
Perry says the experience taught him a valuable lesson.
“This is people’s opinion and there are people who listen to people’s opinion, and they’re valid and valuable opinions. But to me, when I happen to stumble upon one, I look for: what is the truth in this? And what they don’t get. You saw the audience, you see the engagement and the reaction. I have a shorthand and communication with them. So if a critic says ‘why is this-and-this-and-this-and-this happening, he doesn’t understand the people I’m targeting.”