The Triumph of Jordan Peele

It’s hard to ImagIne that just two years ago, Jordan Peele was best known as one half of the Comedy Central duo Key and Peele — a sketch artist who did a masterful range of characters, from a low-energy Latino gang boss, a nightmare girlfriend and a Game of Thrones- obsessed parking valet to a spot-on President Obama. Then came

Get Out, in 2017, the self-described “social thriller” Peele wrote and directed about a black man who comes to realize that his white girlfriend and her family are part of an evil body-snatching unit, and he’s their next victim.

Get Out came out of nowhere — it cost $4.5 million to make and grossed $255 million. Like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction 23 years earlier, Get Out shook the film industry and turned Peele into the hottest young director in Hollywood. The film also challenged the post-racial myth of the Obama years. “He made white viewers see things from a perspective they hadn’t seen before,” says senior writer Brian Hiatt, who profiled Peele for this issue’s cover story. “The classic example is the ending. It might be the first time in Hollywood history where white viewers were scared at the idea of the police showing up.”

Hiatt met with the filmmaker while he was editing his follow-up to Get Out.

(He’s also executive-producing a reboot of The Twilight Zone, coming out later this year.) This time it’s a straight-up horror movie, Us, about family members who get terrorized by their own doppelgängers. “It’s much, much scarier than

Get Out,” says Hiatt.

“It’s important to me that we can tell black stories without it being about race,” Peele told Hiatt. “I realized I had never seen a horror movie of this kind where there’s an African-American family at the center of it. So I feel like it proves a very valid and different point than Get Out, which is, not everything is about race.”

For RollIng Stone, Peele fits into a long tradition (going back to profiles of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman) of covering film directors in the same way we’ve covered the most important musicians of the times: as visionaries who thrill us and help us see the world in new and expansive ways. “Nobody should bet against Jordan on any level,” says Hiatt. “He may want to just keep making horror movies, but it’s also possible he’ll become the new Spielberg.”