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Jordan Peele on a Real Horror Story: Being Black in America 
Peter Yang

The Key & Peele star makes his directorial debut with Get Out, a horror flick where the monster is racism. GQ talks to Peele about the film's inspirations (Rosemary's Baby, among others), its reception in Trump's America, and Tyra Banks's phobia of dolphins.

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out, is the story of a black man who visits the family of his white girlfriend and begins to suspect they’re either a little racist or plotting to annihilate him. Peele examined race for laughs on the Emmy-winning series Key & Peele. But Get Out expresses racial tension in a way we’ve never seen before: as the monster in a horror flick. GQ talked to Peele in his editing studio about using race as fodder for a popcorn thriller and just how evil you can make the white people.

GQ: You started working on this movie before Barack Obama was even in office. It’s hitting theaters at a time when the belligerent host of NBC’s The Apprentice (seasons 1-14) is the President of the United States of America. Two weeks into office, he’s basically running the country like it’s sweeps week, and anything goes. Do you think the movie will resonate differently now than it would have a year ago? Or even a month ago?
Jordan Peele: I think Get Out will resonate differently in Trump's America than it would've if it came out in Obama's America. I really don't know how though. That's the hard thing about a "social thriller". You put in years to make a film, and society is a moving target.  More interesting to me is to feel a part of this renaissance of untapped voices that's happening in the entertainment industry right now. With what Donald [Glover] is doing on Atlanta, what Issa [Rae] is doing with Insecure, and what [director and writer] Ava [DuVernay] is doing with everything... It feels like we can get shit made now, that we never could've before.

You’ve said Get Out is inspired by Rosemary’s Baby and the original Stepford Wives, which both use gender as fodder for scares. Why do you think there are no horror movies about race?
Black creators have not been given a platform, and the African-American experience can only be dealt with by an African-American. That might be problematic to say. And now that I think about it, [The Stepford Wives author] Ira Levin is a man, and he and Roman Polanski wrote Rosemary’s Baby. Let’s say it would be scary for a white writer and director to do something that includes the victimization of black people in this way. Of course, we have this trope where the black guy is the first to die in every horror movie—that’s a way for [white filmmakers] to have their cake and eat it, too.

I was trying to think of horror movies where the black guy did not die first. I came up with two: Deep Blue Sea, with LL Cool J.

And House on Haunted Hill, Taye Diggs.
That’s a remake. I have not seen that.

I don’t know that I recommend it.
[laughs] Great. Another big piece of the puzzle is black leads in film—especially in a genre film, which are seen as being in the moneymaking category—have been looked at as a monetary impossibility for a long time. [But then] you have a movie like Straight Outta Compton doing the worldwide business it did, and I think it opened up the door and told people that [a black lead] doesn’t have to be thought of as a risk. One of the things that this film is about—stepping back from the content—is telling a story with a black protagonist.

When you start making a movie, people want to know: Who’s the star power? And very early, I realized there’s not a lot of 26-year-old black actors who have been given the opportunity to be the lead of a film. It’s like Michael B. Jordan, and then we’re done.

Him and John Boyega from Star Wars.
Who was busy. [laughs] No! But that made the film a little bit more urgent for me, to realize that [young black men] aren’t given the shot to even be in the category of [leading man].

A lot of the comic relief in the movie comes from Chris’s best friend (played by Lil Rel Howery), who works as a TSA agent. When I saw Get Out, I was thinking about how airport security is really the one area of American life where black people are not automatically viewed by the people in power as the most suspicious ones in the room. The President’s recent executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim countries would appear to underscore that point. What are your thoughts on the ban?
I think it's cowardly and evil.

Early on in the movie, there’s a tense interaction between your main character, Chris, and a white police officer that touches on the fraught relationship between black people and cops in the United States. Chris is played by British actor Daniel Kaluuya, who sued the London police in 2013 for allegedly assaulting and falsely imprisoning him after mistaking him for a drug dealer, so he’s obviously had some experience with law enforcement. Still, were you hesitant about not using an African-American actor for this role?
Most important was having an actor who related to the isolation of being the only black person in a given space. My presumption was that might be a uniquely African-American experience. But when I asked Daniel, he was like, “No, bro. This is what my friends and I are always talking about, bro.”

A lot of the horror in the movie comes from the fact that it can be scary to be black. In some situations, it’s just social anxiety, but in others, there’s a real threat that just doesn’t exist for the white characters.
One of the [great] things about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner that anybody can relate to is the uncomfortableness of meeting your in-laws for the first time and being at a party where you’re the outsider. So the layer of race that enriches and complicates that tension [in Get Out] becomes relatable. It’s made to be an inclusive movie. If you don't go through the movie with the main character, I haven't done my job right.

Your wife, Chelsea Peretti, is white. This movie is a terrifying film about the horrors that befall a black man after he meets his white girlfriend’s family. Was that an awkward conversation to have with your in-laws?
Yes—this movie is a true story. [laughs] No, everybody gets it. My family, they’re all very smart, all very funny. This is not the story of my marriage at all.

My dad is a black guy from Philly, and I once dated a white guy from the South. Before they met, my only request to my father was “Please don’t bring up slavery.” Within two minutes: “Your family own slaves?” Have you ever had a meeting with parents go awry?
No, I’m pretty good with parents. But there are situations where I’ll feel racially isolated, and I don’t necessarily know how much of it is warranted—am I being the racist one? That is what this movie is about.

Let’s talk about white people. Were you ever concerned about making the ones in this movie too evil?
Part of what horror is is taking risks and going somewhere that people think you’re not supposed to be able to go, in the name of expressing real-life fears. I put a lot of thought into [the evil of the white characters], and no one ever suggested that I change it.

I really dug the film’s score, which features a lot of whispery lyrics that sounded ominous, even though I couldn’t tell what they were saying—it reminded me of Bruno Coulais’s music for the stop-motion fantasy movie Coraline. It’s not in English, right?
It’s Swahili, actually. It’s such a cool track. I was into this idea of distinctly black voices and black musical references, so it’s got some African influences, and some bluesy things going on, but in a scary way, which you never really hear. African-American music tends to have, at the very least, a glimmer of hope to it—sometimes full-fledged hope. I wanted Michael Abels, who did the score, to create something that felt like it lived in this absence of hope but still had [black roots]. And I said to him, “You have to avoid voodoo sounds, too.”

Do you know what the voices are saying?
The words are issuing a warning to Chris. The whole idea of the movie is “Get out!”—it’s what we’re screaming at the character on-screen. They go, “Brother, brother,” in English, and then something to the effect of, “Watch your back. Something’s coming, and it ain’t good.”

There’s a beautiful and very creepy visual effect that’s used a few times in the film, where Chris appears to be falling through the air in a vacuum. Can you tell me how you filmed it?
We got this huge space in Mobile, Alabama—I think it’s a civic center. We have him hanging from a wire and fans blowing his clothes around. It’s very Cirque du Soleil.

How long can a human stand to hang from a wire and be blown around by huge fans?
We did this scene for a whole day and it was very physically draining for Daniel. Chafing. We [did] very physically exhausting shoots on Key & Peele, so I felt a nice advantage with the actors when [they had to do] something uncomfortable or boring, just knowing where people’s mental states are. It was good for me to have been in a similar rig before and know how uncomfortable it is.

What was the most physically uncomfortable thing you did on Key & Peele?
I played a barbarian, kind of like Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones. The bit was that I chopped an enemy’s head off, and then in the celebration, I start working the crowd with this head. It was a very cold day and I had barbarian armor on, plus all this sticky, corn-syrupy blood that was freezing and congealing on me. And so every time the armor would pull away from my body, it would, like, pull one of my hairs off.

That’s why it’s so important for men to be waxed at all times.
Or at least oiled up. And I did several scenes as the character Wendell, who’s in what is very un-politically-correctly called a “fat suit” in the industry. That was the opposite. It was like 100 degrees in the Valley and I’m doing karate kicks. That suit is smothering. Not for the claustrophobic.

Have you ever seen The Tyra Banks Show episode where Tyra put on a fat suit to experience life as someone who was not a supermodel? She didn’t like it.
I remember it. That was so crazy. She was like, “I feel disrespected!”

For one day.

My other favorite Tyra fact, if you want to talk more about Tyra—
Yeah, let’s get into her.

She’s afraid of dolphins. She did an episode about her phobia.
Was there something that happened when she was a kid that was dolphin-related?

Not that Tyra can recall.
I kind of get it.

Because they have fishlike bodies but human-like brains?
Yeah, there’s something abominable about animals that are very smart, like dolphins and pigs. [They] almost feel like some kind of weird human hybrid. It’s good fodder for me for horror stuff, thinking about the apes and monkeys as well.

They’re a little too close to us.
Part of it is that it reminds us how we mistreat animals, right? When you hear about pigs being, like, as smart as a three-year-old child...

A three-year-old child’s not that smart.
True. But tasty! That’s the best part.

No dolphins in your movie, though.
Actually, there is a moment where Chris is watching TV, and on the television is this old black-and-white underwater movie—and for a moment, we have some dolphin sounds in there. I thought there was something scary about it! Tyra Banks will love or hate this movie.

Besides systemic racism—and it sounds like maybe dolphins—what are you afraid of? Ghosts?
I want to believe in ghosts. I love ghost stories. We were shooting Keanu in New Orleans, and the whole cast went on this ghost tour, led by this sexy, swarthy guy. Like, “If these streets could talk, they’d tell some pretty scary stories. But you probably don’t want to hear about that...” I was looking over at Method Man like, “Oh, my God, I brought a member of the Wu-Tang Clan to this fucking ghost tour. He’s going to hate it.” At the end of the tour, Method Man raises his hand. I was like, “Oh, here it comes.” He goes, “Sometimes I wake up and I feel something sitting on my chest. What is it?” And I’m thinking, It’s blunts, it’s blunts, stop smoking blunts. But the tour guide is like, [nodding] “That’s going to be a night hag.”

One more question: Is Get Out coming out during Black History Month on purpose?

This story originally appeared in the March 2017 issue with the title "Jordan Peele Is Terrifying."

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