The Scotsman

‘It’s about the speechless and the people you render invisible’

Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out explores the horror in middle-class privilege, the director and cast tell Georgia Humphreys

-

Jordan Peele’s directoria­l debut Get Out wasn’t just a box-office success – it redefined the horror genre.

A socially-conscious thriller, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2018, it explores what it means to be black in America, as a young black man uncovers a disturbing secret while meeting the family of his white girlfriend.

Now, New Yorker Peele is back with Us, another original nightmare that he has written, directed and produced.

“I wanted to explore something other than race, and to show the wide range of horror films that I have,” the 40-year-old suggests when asked about the inspiratio­n behind the film.

“I have this fear of a doppelgang­er. And so when you have a real fear as a horror movie creator/ director, then you know you have something that you can nurture and exploit for an audience.”

Us follows Adelaide Wilson (played by Lupita N’yongo) as she returns to her North Carolina home with her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke) and their two children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex).

Meant to be a dreamy summer getaway, Adelaide starts to feel paranoid that something bad is going to happen to her family. And sure enough, they return from the beach one day to find silhouette­s of four figures in their driveway.

But the creepiest thing? The monsters they’re facing are doppelgang­ers of themselves.

Part of the draw of the role for Mexican-kenyan Nyong’o, 36, was that it’s so different from anything audiences will have seen her in before.

“Jordan was asking me to go to places I’ve never been, and giving me two well-rounded, three-dimensiona­l women to play at complete opposite ends of an argument,” explains the actress, who won an Oscar for her film debut in drama 12 Years A Slave.

“And so to be asked to see something from one perspectiv­e and then the next day have to see it from the exact opposite perspectiv­e ... I mean, it was an opportunit­y of a lifetime.”

Us is about a middle-class black family – something we don’t see represente­d in cinema very much.

“I loved how unremarkab­le it was that they were black,” Nyong’o notes, “because I often feel quite unremarkab­le; I don’t live my life always considerin­g the colour of my skin.

“And it was nice to have

“We often fail to recognise the monster in ourselves”

that – a family that we could project our own understand­ing of a family on to, no matter what colour our skin is, and that the paradigms to which they were navigating this particular monster had nothing to do with the colour of their skin. Yeah, that’s refreshing.”

Duke, 32, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, says they are also a family, who are “wrapped in what we would call the American dream, this idea of American normality and class and privilege.

“For me, it was a lot of cultures of power; privilege, power, luxury. What is it and what’s the cost of that?

“It’s about the speechless and the people you render invisible in your shadow, who carry the burden of your actions. For me, that really spoke volumes – it really made me question myself and see my experience­s of privilege.

“I come from a historical­ly oppressed background and I don’t really see my life as one that is privileged, until you put it in the context of people who don’t have as much as you, people who have to suffer to make your life as privileged as it is. So, it really put me into a different category of how I see myself.”

Star Wars actress Nyong’o, who also appeared alongside Duke in Black Panther, admits she was taken aback by the script when she first read it.

She made sure to pick Peele’s brain about the imagery, and the social commentary on the US which is woven into the story, before going on set.

And it seems the idea “of recognisin­g the monster in the man in the mirror” is one that has really stayed with her.

“There’s a duality in all of us, there’s a darkness that we often suppress and it is in suppressin­g that side of ourselves that it can become destructiv­e, because we project it out of ourselves and onto other people and onto other things,” she says.

“So, especially in this time when people are pointing a lot of fingers to the ‘other’ – the other gender, the other country, the other political faction, the other religion, the other ethnicity – we often fail to recognise the monster in ourselves, and this was a film that was anthropomo­rphising that monster.”

● Us is out now in UK cinemas

 ??  ?? 0 Lupita N’yongo with Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex in Us, above; Oscar-winning director Jordan Peele, below
0 Lupita N’yongo with Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex in Us, above; Oscar-winning director Jordan Peele, below
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom