Jordan Peele begins by telling me a scary story. It’s from when he was a teenager, studying at Sarah Lawrence College, north of Manhattan. He would often take the train up, late at night. “You get out of the train and you have to go down through an underpass and come out the other side. There’s no one else there, just this dark, American town. I’d come up and I’d look over to the other side, and I’d picture seeing the tail end of myself going down that same tunnel, to presumably emerge right near me 30 seconds later. And I can’t be seen by that other version of me.” The idea of meeting his doppelganger terrified Peele. “And that’s where I love to start with a horror story: ‘What is this primal thing that’s affecting me in a way I don’t quite understand?’”
We are not in a particularly scary setting: a bare, white, decidedly un-Hollywood back office on the lot of Universal Studios. Nor is Peele exactly a terrifying presence, except perhaps in terms of reputation. He is wearing black jeans, a green sweater, box-fresh white Nikes, a notch smarter than his traditional “90s slacker” dress code. The greying beard gives him a certain maturity, but there’s still a boyish cuddliness to him. He is not the clown his television persona suggests, but nor does he come across as a brooding master of suspense. He’ll even break out his Barack Obama impersonation later.
But horror is where Peele is at right now. His debut, Get Out, was the crossover horror hit film-makers dream of: hugely successful commercially (more than $250m worldwide, from a budget of $4.5m), critically (including a best original screenplay Oscar for Peele last year), and culturally (witness how “the Sunken Place” has become part of the language). All of which makes Peele’s follow-up one of the most anticipated titles of the year. The burden of expectation must have been unbearable.
“You know, it doesn’t feel too different,” he says calmly. “With Get Out, I had the fear that if it went wrong, it would go terribly wrong. I don’t have that fear with this movie, but of course there’s the fear of betraying the expectations of somebody who wants, essentially, Get Out 2, and what happens when they realise this is a very, very different movie.”
Get Out gave Peele options. He was offered BlacKkKlansman, for example (he decided Spike Lee should direct it instead, and he would produce). He was offered big superhero movies (he won’t say which ones). If he’d wanted to make a Get Out sequel, he could have named his price. But really Peele was committed to directing his own, original stories, mostly in the key of horror.
Us takes Peele’s doppelganger anecdote and runs with it. In this scenario, everyone has a secret double and, like Peele, we wouldn’t want to meet them. But that’s exactly what happens to Us’s central family, led by Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke. Early into their California beach holiday, four strangers come knocking at the door; except they’re not strangers, they’re them. Or rather, scarier versions of themselves (played by the same actors), wearing red jumpsuits, wielding gold scissors and speaking in weird voices about “the Untethering”.
Us ticks a lot of horror boxes – zombie apocalypse, home invasion, creepy kids – without fitting neatly into any of them. Like Get Out, it is a fiendishly constructed story, packed with jump scares, gory violence and moments of surreal lunacy. Not to mention enough cryptic symbols, pop-culture references and recurring motifs to keep the online decipherers busy. What do these “Tethered” people want? Where have they come from? Why the gloved right hands? And what’s with all the rabbits?
“Well, you know I wanted to make a movie full of Easter eggs,” Peele answers, smirking. Then he gives a more revealing explanation: “They’re an animal of duality. They’re adorable but they terrify me at the same time. And they got those scissor-like ears that creep me out.”
Us is less black and white than Get Out, you could say – more mysterious, more open to interpretation. It is less clear cut who to root for when the heroes and villains are essentially the same people. The idea of a “shadow self” is well established both in psychology (Carl Jung was big on it) and in horror (Jekyll and Hyde, for example), but Us brings it into unsettlingly contemporary focus.
“We are our own worst enemy,” says Peele, “not just as individuals but more importantly as a group, as a family, as a society, as a country, as a world. We are afraid of the shadowy, mysterious ‘other’ that’s gonna come and kill us and take our jobs and do whatever, but what we’re really afraid of is the thing we’re suppressing: our sin, our guilt, our contribution to our own demise … No one’s taking responsibility for where we’re at. Owning up, blaming ourselves for our part in the problems of the world is something I’m not seeing.”
Peele knows this is a message that audiences might not want to take home. That is why it needs saying, he suggests. Get Out was also a similar exercise in saying the unsayable, after all. He began writing it in response to wishful Obama-era discussions about a “post-racial” America – which Peele knew to be an illusion. By the time Get Out was released, in Trump-shocked 2017, the rest of the world had realised that, too. But Peele dismisses the idea that he was predicting the future: “That movie was a reaction to that time the same way the Trump movement was a reaction to that time, and therefore totally not a coincidence.”
In Us, the central characters happen to be African-American, but their skin colour is of little relevance. “Scores of people will walk into this movie waiting for the racial commentary, and when it doesn’t come in the form they’re looking for, they’ll be forced to ask themselves: ‘Why did I think a movie with black people had to be about blackness?’” Maybe that is a step towards that post-racial dreamland.
Peele has always had a complex relationship with race. According to convention, he is classified as “black”; in fact he is mixed race. His father (whom he barely knew) was black; his mother (who raised him in New York’s upper west side) was white. He grew up “knowing my identity was a representation of the absurdity of the idea of race”. His “black” appearance marked him out in white social circles; his “white” accent marked him out in black ones. “I think that gave me a perspective that, in its best and worst sense, had me feeling like an outsider.”
Having gravitated towards comedy and improv at college, he found a kindred spirit in Keegan-Michael Key, who is also mixed race. They met in 2003 on the sketch show Mad TV, and their gifts for mimicry and their on-screen chemistry led to their own show, Key & Peele, which ran from 2012 to 2015. “Our ability to be chameleons starts from having an unclear starting point when it comes to identity,” he says. “We were liberated by the fact that we could choose who we wanted to be.”
The “absurdity of race” was a big part of Key & Peele’s comedy. As with the sketch where they ruin a Confederate civil war re-enactment by turning up in role as stereotypical slaves. Or the one where they face off as rival “magical negroes” – a janitor and a repairman, both offering wise platitudes to a troubled white guy. Or the horror sketch (possibly a precursor for Get Out) where Key and Peele discover they are basically invisible to the marauding zombies because they are black – “These are some racist motherfuckin’ zombies!” Best known of all, perhaps, are Key and Peele’s sketches of Barack Obama and his “anger translator”, Luther. While Peele does a perfect imitation of Obama’s measured, halting pronouncements, Key’s manic Luther translates the president’s message into a more accessible language. (Peele: “I want to wish my opponent Mitt Romney well. He ran a good campaign.” Key: “Take that shit back to the lab, Mitt, ’cos ya lost!”) The sketches were so successful, the real Barack Obama recruited Key’s Luther to perform alongside him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2015.
When I ask Peele if he misses Obama, he slips straight into character: “Well, you know, all you need to do is, ah … mention his name and I’ll pretty much go into the … ah … the impression. I got no shame.” Perhaps Peele is actually Obama’s shadow self? He stays in role: “I’m … he’s my … no … ah … I’m his. I don’t know who I am. Yeah he’s my Tethered.”
If comedy was an outlet for the absurdities of Peele’s life, perhaps horror has been a channel for the anxieties. The two genres go hand in hand, in many ways; both are mechanisms for releasing those stresses and fears. As well as racial paranoia, Get Out mines its fatherless hero’s guilt over his mother’s death in a hit and run. “The missing father is the phantom hanging over that movie,” Peele once said. The father figure is present in Us, but he’s a bit of a macho asshole. The emotional centre is really Nyong’o, who is conflicted and isolated, and has a close bond with her son. Us’s family focus is doubly acute now that Peele is a father himself. He has an eight-month-old son with actor Chelsea Peretti, whom he married in 2016.
Horror was Peele’s first love, he says. He describes himself as “a scared kid”, but he was also the one who’d tell scary stories around the campfire: “The feeling of hearing an audience go ‘Ooh-hoo-hoo’ and shuddering. I got results. That sort of marked the transition from the scared kid to the guy who lived with the monsters, who could wield the fear.”
Now Peele has come out as a horror nut, he is making up for lost time. Next month, he launches a star-studded reboot of The Twilight Zone for CBS’s All Access streaming service, in which he serves as co-producer and host. He has also got Lovecraft Country – another horror-tinged drama for HBO, co-producing with JJ Abrams. Then there is his sci-fi web comedy Weird City (think Black Mirror with LOLs), and a “spiritual sequel” to horror classic Candyman (producing and co-writing, with Nia DaCosta as director). Plus he is reuniting with Keegan-Michael Key for cameos in Toy Story 4 and the stop-motion comedy Wendell and Wild, which they have co-written. A whole Peele universe is forming.
Getting back to the topic in hand, Peele hints that Get Out and Us are part of a quartet of movies he is planning, but he won’t go into details. “I have a plan,” he admits. “I’m someone who operates somewhere between best-laid plans and complete ability to shift and pivot.”
Is there a connection between Get Out’s “Sunken Place” and Us’s “Tethered”?
He chooses his words carefully: “Without answering directly if they’re in the same universe, I will say that, yes, I consider this part of the same project.”
Cryptic mythology aside, what really connects Peele’s universe is that, in both Get Out and Us, the horror is not supernatural or extraterrestrial in origin; it is human. “So much of horror is focused on naming the evil as something else. What I love to explore, and what I intend to explore with my future films as well in this series – if you want to put it like that – is the idea that we need to look no further than the mirror to find the darkest monster of all.”
Us is out in cinemas on 22 March
