Few filmmakers have been as successful at capturing the underlying terror of modern life as Jordan Peele, whose critically and commercially acclaimed horror movies have set new benchmarks for the industry. Long-standing fans of Peele’s work as a comic performer may be less surprised than most by the star’s easy leap from comedy to horror, as both genres play well to Peele’s eye for detail and skillful scenesetting abilities. While Jordan continues to create new narratives to reflect our world, he’s increasingly taking more direct steps to help people through charitable donations and support for social relief efforts on the ground.
A great loss to puppeteering
Jordan was born in 1979 in New York City to a white mother and black father. His parents split up when he was seven, and Jordan found being raised alone by his mom challenging for many reasons, not least the way he spoke: “The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. I speak like my mom; I speak like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.” As a biracial child, Jordan frequently found himself facing questions about his background, something which he claims would have a major influence on his upbringing and future career choices: “I even remember when I was a kid that every now and then you'd come up on somebody who would question how I spoke and whether or not I was trying to be something I wasn't. It cannot be a coincidence that I decided to go into a career where my whole purpose is altering the way I speak and experiencing these different characters and maybe proving in my soul that the way someone speaks has nothing to do with who they are.”
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Few filmmakers have been as successful at capturing the underlying terror of modern life as Jordan Peele, whose critically and commercially acclaimed horror movies have set new benchmarks for the industry. Long-standing fans of Peele’s work as a comic performer may be less surprised than most by the star’s easy leap from comedy to horror, as both genres play well to Peele’s eye for detail and skillful scenesetting abilities. While Jordan continues to create new narratives to reflect our world, he’s increasingly taking more direct steps to help people through charitable donations and support for social relief efforts on the ground.
A great loss to puppeteering
Jordan was born in 1979 in New York City to a white mother and black father. His parents split up when he was seven, and Jordan found being raised alone by his mom challenging for many reasons, not least the way he spoke: “The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. I speak like my mom; I speak like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.” As a biracial child, Jordan frequently found himself facing questions about his background, something which he claims would have a major influence on his upbringing and future career choices: “I even remember when I was a kid that every now and then you'd come up on somebody who would question how I spoke and whether or not I was trying to be something I wasn't. It cannot be a coincidence that I decided to go into a career where my whole purpose is altering the way I speak and experiencing these different characters and maybe proving in my soul that the way someone speaks has nothing to do with who they are.”
That career was comedy, although the path Jordan took to that route was highly circuitous. On graduating high school he initially enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College with the intention of studying puppetry, and it was only after some terms studying the ancient and underappreciated art that he made the switch to the more contemporary world of sketch comedy writing. Jordan joined the impov comedy theatre troupe Boom Chicago, and it was here that he would meet his future writing partner Keegan-Michael Key.
Conquering the YouTube era
Jordan and Keegan-Michael would initially work together on the long running TV sketch show Mad TV; the two had originally been competing in auditions for one role, but their comedic chemistry was so palpable that both comics were hired in 2003. They worked together on the show for five seasons, with Peele becoming well known for his many excellent impressions of celebrities including James Brown, Flavor Flav, Morgan Freeman and Forest Whitaker. While successful, real fame would only come for the pair when they started their own show, Key and Peele, in 2012.
Working as a pair rather than as part of a troupe gave the two comedians far more room to express their ideas, and it came at an opportune time alongside YouTube’s rise to cultural dominance. The pair swiftly established themselves as the top sketch comics of the era, and as of 2022 they pair’s sketches have had over 1.8bn views on YouTube. Their success has been attributed to many factors, but one factor which was overlooked at the time was Jordan Peele’s burgeoning talent for filmmaking. Many of the show’s most popular and successful skits are pastiches and tributes, which often revealed Peele’s love of the horror genre; the alarming Aerobics Meltdown sketch in which the pair enact a 1987 jazz aerobics competition that features perfect recreation of VHS recording artifacts and an attempted murder, or their most famous sketch, Continental Breakfast, notable for its absurdist but reverent nod to Kubrick’s The Shining.
Getting out
The seeds of Jordan’s later career direction were there to be seen in Key and Peele’s work, but nobody could have anticipated that his success as a horror director would eclipse his achievements as a comedian. Jordan did not seem prepared for this outcome either, and would later say that although he had dreamt of becoming a horror movie director from his teenage years he deliberately moved away from the field because "I adored the form so much I felt I couldn’t possibly make a movie as good as my favorite movies.”
He needn’t have worried. His debut feature, Get Out, seemed to tap into a zeitgeist of escalating racial tension in the United States, and was reviewed as a triumphant examination of underlying problems within American society, but Peele had been ruminating on the film’s concept for over a decade. Get Out’s themes of unspoken racism among elite white America were first thought up as a response to the Presidency of Barack Obama, and the prevalent impression of the time - largely among white liberals - that America was moving towards a post-racial society. While America had changed a great deal in the intervening decade, the relevancy of the film’s themes had not, and Peele’s debut as a horror director could not have gone much better: Get Out led to him becoming the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as the fifth best movie of the decade.
Saying yes to Nope
Jordan’s next two movies, 2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope, have continued Peele’s trend for making culturally significant horror movies that are as critically acclaimed as they are commercially successful. They’ve also bolstered his ability to do more than just comment on society’s problems; in 2020 he announced that through his production company, Monkeypaw Productions, he would be donating $1m to five charities “we see as essential to the health and lives of black people”, including Black Lives Matter, Fair Fight and the Equal Justice Initiative.
Jordan with his wife, Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Chelsea Peretti
Peele continues to produce remarkable work inspired by his love of horror - 2022’s Wendell and Wild sees him collaborating with beloved stop-motion animator Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline), as well as reunited with his old comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key, on a new horror-comedy franchise for Netflix. With the tremendous success of his movies it is certain that there will not just be many more Jordan Peele films to come, but also more opportunities for him to give back to the communities who have supported him, and who he has in turn inspired.
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