![]() I thought that was such an interesting way to put it because she was like ‘you have to have a kind of delusional way of thinking about life to aim for something that you’ve never experienced or knew was possible.’ I was trying to remember what it was like, what I was going through: ‘this thing happened and I felt this way and this didn’t happen and I felt this way.’ Then I got emotional. a dream that came true and it took this amount of time. I did a screening in Alabama and a woman asked ‘how did you feel during this process?’ She wanted me to walk through my emotional journey going through the ups and downs of the film. Q: What is one question you wish someone would ask?Ī: It’s something that people have asked me and I just feel there should be a different way to ask it. I think that is the most exciting movement that the industry can go is by absorbing and adopting as many new voices as possible. I think it’s most important to work with my peers and people whose voices we have not heard. I’m really interested in working with similar people like Issa Rae and Mindy Kaling, people that have really solidified themselves in the zeitgeist as creators. Being able to submit myself as a genre-agnostic creator and do whatever they want is the goal. I say that I want my career to be like a marriage of Jordan Peele and Kenny Ortega because I also have a deep love for musicals. We’ve had a career that I thought has been very similar - from sketch to The Second City to now horror, it’s just been a lot of similarities. ![]() Of course, Jordan Peele, I loved him from the beginning. Are there any other people that you’re itching to work with?Ī: There’s a running list. Q: You were a writer on “The Amber Ruffin Show,” someone who in other interviews you mentioned as being influential in your career. Very existential fears - those are things that I fear. What if I lose myself and I don’t have enough know-how to get it back. I still have anxiety on films because I have to put my safety in the hands of a pilot that I don’t know. It’s all very exciting.Ī: I have a general fear of lack of control. The idea of “The Blackening” being added to that lexicon as a new film, is that we can then stretch what we think this genre could be. a lot of people are comparing it to either Jordan Peele or “Scary Movie” because that is what we’ve been given. We wanted to push the genre to include this new thing. And that was the intention - we didn’t want to recreate something. I think in doing so, we did create something that felt unique. We did not want to create something that had too deep of a meaning, but we also didn’t want it to be as broad as “Scary Movie.” We wanted to create characters that felt real and grounded, but were in situations that were innately horrific, and then use comedy to bring levity to it. ![]() How did you walk that line?Ī: That was very intentional. Q: This film hit all the main horror genre points without it being too cerebral, a la Jordan Peele, or too slapstick, a la Wayans family work. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. We sat down with the native South Sider, a Curie High School/DePaul University graduate whose least favorite Kool-Aid flavor is grape, to talk “The Blackening” and learned how it ties to Perkins’ idea of legacy, self-love, and his future in entertainment. snowballed into more than I ever thought it could,” Perkins said during a visit to Chicago promoting the film. Perkins said the sketch was the joke that launched his thousand ships in the entertainment industry. What started as poking fun of the comical nature of horror movies, human reactions, and horror movie tropes that don’t favor people of color, turned into a Comedy Central sketch video in 2018 and is now a full feature film, released June 16. The set of friends have to decide among themselves who will be sacrificed to the killer to save the rest of the group - the catch? The chosen one has to be the “Blackest” person among them. And according to Perkins, that was the same year that “The Blackening” was born in a sketch while Perkins was at The Second City.įor those unaware, “The Blackening,” makes fun of the old horror movie trope of the Black character always being the first to die, but flips the script of that by making all the characters in the spoof Black. Not gonna lie, Dewayne Perkins, the multi-hyphenate entertainer (comedian, writer, actor, producer) has been on the Tribune’s radar for quite some time.Ĭritic Nina Metz has followed his trajectory ever since seeing him as part of the nine-member 3Peat improv group at iO Theatre in 2016.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |