Jordan Peele learned at summer camp that telling scary stories kills your own fear
As a boy, Jordan Peele told a frightening campfire tale and noticed his own fear had vanished. If you make the horror, he reasoned, you need not be scared of it. Decades later that insight, plus years of sketch comedy, produced Get Out and an Oscar for its screenplay.
A New Yorker since birth on February 21, 1979, Peele is the son of a white mother from Maryland, Lucinda Williams, and an African American father from North Carolina, Hayward Peele Jr., whom he last saw at seven. His mother raised him alone on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A film lover from early childhood, he had decided by 12 that he would direct, and cites Glory, Edward Scissorhands and Aliens among the pictures that shaped him. A scholarship took him to the Calhoun School, and at Sarah Lawrence College he majored in puppetry before leaving after two years to form a comedy double act with classmate Rebecca Drysdale.
Improv came next: he played regularly with Boom Chicago, an English-language troupe in the Netherlands, and trained with Keegan-Michael Key at The Second City. Mad TV hired him in 2003. Producers were expected to pick Key over him, but the pair's chemistry got them both cast. Peele specialised in impressions of figures such as Morgan Freeman and Flavor Flav, earned a 2008 Emmy nomination for a 50 Cent parody song he wrote, and left after five seasons.
Key & Peele, their Comedy Central show from 2012 to 2015, won two Primetime Emmys and a Peabody. In 2012 Peele also founded Monkeypaw Productions, which would back his later work, including Candyman in 2021.
His first film as director, Get Out in 2017, was a hit with both critics and audiences, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. He earned another Best Picture nomination as a producer of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, then wrote and directed Us in 2019 and Nope in 2022. Critics now often rank Get Out above all as one of the defining films of this century. He has also voiced characters in Toy Story 4 and Big Mouth and hosted a revival of The Twilight Zone.
Source: Jordan Peele
