“The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak,” he noted in 2013, in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air. Growing up in a biracial family, Peele frequently had to code switch, a fact that played a huge part in his upbringing and made a deep impression on him. Peele, 40, was born in New York City in 1979 and raised on the Upper West Side.

The nature of Peele’s upbringing primed him to explore themes of persona and performativity in his comedy While you might not see any direct connection between his comic beginnings and his current status as a critically acclaimed genre auteur, if we take a closer look, it’s easy to see just how much of an overlap there is between Peele’s past and present work - and just how well Key & Peele prepared him to take his explorations of genre conventions and tropes to the next level. In fact, he’s even better known as a comedy writer and performer, as one half of the comedy sketch duo Key and Peele, stars of the cult hit Comedy Central show of the same name. And on top of directing his sophomore feature, Peele’s also hosting CBS All Access’s highly anticipated upcoming Twilight Zone reboot, a role that taps into his expansive knowledge of horror as a genre and as a medium for exploring our deepest anxieties.īut as all these recent and upcoming projects indicate, Peele doesn’t just do horror - not even close. The series he co-created for TBS, The Last O.G., is returning for a second season Peele also co-wrote the recent YouTube Premium sci-fi anthology series Weird City. On the acting side, he’s joined the cast of Netflix’s upcoming stop-motion movie Wendell and Wild, and he’s voicing a character in the upcoming Toy Story 4. He’s also executive-producing a remake of Candyman, the cult horror movie about gentrification that influenced Get Out. In the wake of his Get Out success, he’s also recently executive produced the Amazon Prime documentary Lorena, as well as another upcoming Amazon Prime series, The Hunt. Us has cemented Peele’s place within the recent modern era of innovative, original, and allegorically rich horror filmmaking. The highly anticipated and critically acclaimed horror movie had advanced ticket sales that surpassed both Get Out and 2018’s sleeper horror hit A Quiet Place, and knocked Captain Marvel off her box office throne with a record-breaking $70 million opening weekend - the highest ever for an original horror film, and second-highest for an action-adventure movie. So it’s hardly a surprise that Peele’s follow-up film, Us, has had one of the buzziest openings of 2019 so far. Get Out was the rare crowd-pleaser that enjoyed tremendous critical acclaim, a viral meme factory that also received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and yielded Peele the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It’s a canny, vastly entertaining horror movie, deeply rooted in well-established tropes of the genre but equally rooted in the experience of being black in America. Various Characters: That's better, thank you! Now, 'Ay-ay-ron.' Where are you? Where is Ay-ay-ron right now? No ay-ay-ron, huh? Well you better be sick, dead or mute Ay-ay-ron.Two years after Jordan Peele’s buzzy and groundbreaking film debut electrified pop culture, Get Out remains not only one of the most important films of 2017 but also one of the most significant films in recent memory. Various Characters: You say your name right, right now. 'De-nice.' Is there a De-nice? If one of y'all says some silly-ass name, this whole class is gonna feel my wrath. Various Characters: 'Cuz we could go to war. Various Characters: Are you outta your God-damned mind? 'Blake?' What? Do you wanna go to war, Buh-lah-kay?

Various Characters: Where is Buh-lah-gay at? No Buh-lah-kay here today? Various Characters: Okay, so that's how it's gonna be. Various Characters: Where's Jay-quellin at? No Jay-quellin here? I taught school for 20 years in the inner city, so don't even think about messing with me! Y'all feel me? Okay, let's take roll here. Various Characters: All right, listen up, y'all.

Key and peele classroom