Oscar glory for Jordan Peele
Director and writer of the Oscar-winning Get Out reflects on the success of his searing hit movie
HE WAS preparing to meet his girlfriend’s parents a few years ago when it suddenly occurred to him: did they know he was black? They were, after all, as white as the driven snow and it might have come as a shock to them to see a black man arriving for dinner with their daughter.
No, she said – she hadn’t told them. The idea scared him, says Jordan Peele (39). “I realised I didn’t want to see an adjustment on their face when they realised they weren’t getting what they thought.”.
Things turned out okay with the meeting, although the relationship didn’t last. And he hasn’t divulged whether he faced the same issue some years later when he got together with Chelsea Peretti (40), who’s now his wife and the mother of their eight-month-old son, Beaumont.
But that meet-the-parents business with the ex-girlfriend lingered in his mind – and helped turn him into one of the sensations of the 2018 awards season.
His movie, Get Out, was nominated for four Oscars – best director, best picture, best original screenplay and best actor. Jordan nabbed the best original screenplay gong, the first person of colour to do so.
The film has been hailed by critics as a “cultural phenomenon”, with the Los Angeles Times noting it’s inspired countless “Get Out-inspired fan art across social media”.
If you haven’t seen it, this is the plot in a nutshell: the main character, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), is invited by his white girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), to meet her parents for the first time.
Rose – like the ex-girlfriend – has negTOP: lected to inform her folks (played by Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) that her new boyfriend is black.
During his stay at the house, Rose’s mom hypnotises Chris and he disappears into a mental state referred to as the “sunken place”. Chris soon realises he’s been lured into a trap and his girlfriend’s parents are planning to kill him.
It’s been described as an oddball movie that veers between horror and hilarity – and it’s made Jordan only the fifth black director to be nominated in the best director category at the Oscars in 90 years. He ended up losing out to Mexican director Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water.
Get Out has been a box office success – made on a budget of just $4,5 million (R54 million), it’s gone on to gross an impressive $255 million (R3 billion).
Jordan, who says his movie straddles the fine line between comedy and horror, says he was also trying to give audiences something “meatier to chew on” and hopes the meaning isn’t trivialised.
“What the movie is about isn’t funny,” he says. “I’ve had many black people come up to me and say, ‘Man, this is the movie we’ve been talking about for a while and you did it.’ That’s a very powerful thing.”
Josh Rottenberg of the LA Times attributed the film’s success to the fact it was released at one of the most politically charged moments in memory – soon after the inauguration of US president Donald Trump last year.
Jordan agrees. “Get Out resonated differently in Trump’s America than it would’ve if it came out in Obama’s America,” he says.
But although Jordan acknowledges that he owes some of the film’s success to the backlash against the conservatives
who emerged when Trump took the presidency, the film also takes on what he calls the “liberal elite”.
“The liberal elite who communicate that ‘we’re not racist in any way’ are as much of the problem as anything else,” he says.
“This movie is about the lack of acknowledgement that racism exists. In the Trump era it’s way more obvious that extreme racism exists. But there are still a lot of people who think, ‘We don’t have a racist bone in our bodies.’ We have to face the racism in ourselves.”
JORDAN himself is the product of a mixed-race couple. His African-American father, Hayward, was largely absent during his childhood and he knows the feeling of being an outsider because of the colour of your skin all too well.
His white mom, Lucinda Williams, recalls how when Jordan was a baby people would “assume he was adopted or I was watching someone else’s child”.
“When he was still in a stroller I’d see people’s faces freeze and then look away when they leant in to admire the baby. You could almost see a ‘Does not compute’ sign light up in their eyes.”
Despite this, Jordan had a happy childhood with his mom, whom he credits with giving him an appreciation of films.
Lucinda was an avid moviegoer and, after taking in classics such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, she’d ask her son what he thought.
“She’d want to know what I liked about it and whether the movie spoke to me,” he recalls. I sort of figured out along the way that the people responsible for my favourite movies were the directors.”
After dropping out of college Jordan worked hard at establishing himself in the entertainment industry and gained traction as an improvisational theatre actor – but there again he encountered the feeling of being an outsider.
“Black people who want to do comedy go into stand-up, where our heroes have opened a lot of doors,” says Jordan, referring to comedy greats such as Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock. “Improv doesn’t have a ton of heroes you can look to.”
Still, he persevered and by 2012 the comedy sketch show Key & Peele, in which he co-starred with long-time pal Keegan-Michael Key (46), was an internet sensation.
Their hilarious skits garnered thousands of fans on YouTube and even caught the attention of then US president Barrack Obama, who incorporated one of them, The Obama Anger Translator, into his speech at the 2015 White House Correspondents Dinner.
DESPITE Jordan’s success as a comedic actor, he never gave up on his dream of being a filmmaker.
“I knew I wanted to create worlds and that world would be some sort of horror or Gothic fantasy we’d never seen before,” he says.
“Everything I did was working toward that skill set of being a director.”
Get Out is the culmination of that work and its success is nothing short of phenomenal – only two other directors, Warren Beatty in 1978 for Heaven Can Wait and James L Brooks in 1983 for Terms of Endearment, have also received best director, best picture and best original screenplay Oscar nominations for their debut. What’s next for Jordan? “I have four other social thrillers I want to unveil in the next decade,” he says.
“The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we’re capable of, especially when we get together.
“I’ve been working on different social demons and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons.”
But right now he’s revelling in family life and taking a moment to reflect on his happiness.
“It feels almost contrived and untrue,” he says.
He and Chelsea – who stars in Brooklyn Nine-Nine and is the sister of Buzzfeed founder Johan Peretti – have been together for two years and their life together is his “personal dream”, Jordan says.
Sometimes, he adds, the success he’s had feels almost surreal. “It kind of makes you question reality.” Yet unlike the monsters and ghouls floating around in Jordan’s rich imagination, his success is very real.