Here
in his personal office, Peele, the celebrated comedian turned Academy
Award-winning horror filmmaker, was watching an old episode of “The Twilight Zone,” the classic science-fiction anthology series that he is helping to revive.
On a recent March morning, Peele had, with some calculation, chosen a 1960 installment called “Mirror Image,”
from the show’s debut season. It stars Vera Miles (“Psycho”) as a woman
convinced she is being followed by her exact double, and Martin Milner
(“Route 66”) as the man who doesn’t believe her until it is too late.
Peele has pointed to “Mirror Image” as an inspiration for his new film, “Us,” in which Lupita Nyong’o
and her family are besieged by murderous doppelgängers. He also admires
the episode, written by the “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling, for
its ability to elicit jump-scares without relying on supernatural beasts
or extraterrestrial beings. In his favorite tales of terror, Peele told
me, “I love human beings as the monster, as the horror.”
This is a suspenseful juncture for Peele, who grew up revering “The
Twilight Zone,” and Serling in particular, for imbuing the show with a
social consciousness and using its genre tropes to address the ills and
anxieties of Cold War-era America.
Four years after the end of “Key & Peele”
and two years after his directorial debut, “Get Out,” his hit thriller
about seemingly well-intentioned white people who insert themselves into
black people’s bodies, Peele is now an executive producer of a new
“Twilight Zone” series. (The first episodes will be released April 1 on
CBS All Access.) He is also playing the part of its dapper, deadpan
narrator, book-ending each episode as Serling did on the show.
Peele
accepted this on-camera role warily, and was uneasy about bringing back
“The Twilight Zone” at all. He doesn’t easily embrace comparisons to
Serling, a singularly influential figure in television who wrote many of
the show’s most beloved segments and helped audiences see contemporary
consequences in his stories of enchanted artifacts, interstellar travel
and nuclear Armageddon.
But in this
tale of unlikely parallels, Peele has been shadowing Serling’s
trajectory all along, whether or not he wants to admit it. He, too, has
used genre entertainment to convey otherwise unpalatable truths to his
viewers, deploying sketch comedy to comment on police brutality or horror movies to skewer self-satisfied liberals.
In his efforts
to resuscitate “The Twilight Zone,” he has been reminded of a valuable
lesson that might explain why he is, after all, a worthy successor to
Serling’s mantle — an instructive philosophy that Peele said is as
applicable to horror as it is to comedy: Always be thinking ahead of
your viewers.
“If you can predict
where an audience thinks it’s going to go, you can use it against them,”
he said. “And they’ll love you for it.”
These days there
are many twists and turns in Peele’s life, including the vertiginous
path up the Hollywood Hills to an outpost of his company, Monkeypaw
Productions. The building is a sparsely furnished colonial home where
“Us” was edited, and his personal office is decorated with vinyl dolls
of the creepy twin girls from “The Shining”; a lunch box depicting Daniel Kaluuya’s tear-streaked face in “Get Out”; and — oh, yes — the Oscar that Peele won for writing its screenplay.
The
smash success of “Get Out” (which took in more than $255 million
worldwide) has enabled Peele to produce countless other projects,
including Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and the Amazon documentary series “Lorena,” as well as coming horror offerings like the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” and a remake of the movie “Candyman.”
Peele,
40, doesn’t carry himself like a budding media mogul. He was dressed
today like a stylish cult member, in black sweat clothes and white
Nikes, and he spoke softly and haltingly about his accomplishments.
“Obviously, I have an ego,” he said, “but I’m in constant attempts to
remind myself where I come from and to humble myself. It’s how I work
best.”
Before he broke through as a professional portrayer of President Obama and college football players
with names like L’Carpetron Dookmarriot, Peele was — and still is — an
unapologetic pop-culture geek who grew up on “Gremlins,” “Jaws” and Tim
Burton movies. Another crucial touchstone was “The Twilight Zone”: It
originally aired on CBS from 1959 to 1964, and his mother introduced him
to the reruns.
Peele is pretty sure
the first episode he saw was “To Serve Man,” from 1962, in which humans
discover that the titular text of a seemingly benevolent alien race is actually a cookbook.
Though time and familiarity have reduced this twist ending to a dad
joke, Peele argued that “To Serve Man” was still bone-chilling. “You
tell somebody that and it sounds pretty silly — watch the episode and
you’re ready to believe it,” he said.
His pop perspective was shaped by other vintage installments, also written by Serling: “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “I Am the Night — Color Me Black,” which dealt directly with societal bias and racism, and cruelly ironic episodes like “Time Enough at Last,”
in which Burgess Meredith plays the bookish survivor of an atomic
apocalypse, stranded with a lifetime supply of reading material and a
pair of broken glasses.
“I love the
ones that, essentially, take someone’s tragic flaw and exploit it,”
Peele said. “You set up a character and you show their tailor-made worst
nightmare.”
Serling, who died in
1975, envisioned “The Twilight Zone” as a delivery system for parables
with deliberate messages of social justice and allegories of human
weakness and folly, coated in a digestible layer of fantasy.
As his widow,
Carol Serling, told me, its sci-fi trappings allowed her husband to
avoid creative interference and “get his points across — his social
feelings that he wanted to talk about.”
In
that era of television, she said, “You couldn’t do this, you couldn’t
do that, you couldn’t put the Chrysler Building onscreen if another car
company was sponsoring the show, which was crazy. He felt that by
escaping into outer space, so to speak, he could get these stories
across — and he did.”
“The Twilight Zone” has already spawned a 1983 movie
and two other TV revivals, from 1985-9 and 2002-3, none regarded
anywhere near as fondly as the original series. For the past few years,
Simon Kinberg (a writer, producer and director of the “X-Men” film
franchise) had been contemplating a new TV incarnation but couldn’t
crack it. Should it tell a serialized story? Feature a repertory cast?
Take place in an actual location called the Twilight Zone? These changes
felt gimmicky and wrong.
More
crucially, Kinberg said, “There wasn’t a feeling of historical relevancy
to the show, because we were living in a moment of, at least, perceived
stability.”
Then two things
happened: first, the 2016 presidential election. Next, Kinberg and his
colleagues saw “Get Out,” which they regarded as a modern-day “Twilight
Zone” in its own right. Soon, Peele and Kinberg were meeting to hash out
ideas and realizing that perhaps the show’s classic formula didn’t need
updating after all.
“In many ways it
feels like somehow the wires got crossed and we’re in the wrong
dimension — this was not supposed to be like this,” Peele said. “It felt
like, if Serling were here, he’d have a lot to say and a lot of new
episodes he couldn’t have written back in his time.”
Their
new installments include “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” (which has a
teleplay by Marco Ramirez, and a story by Peele, Kinberg and Ramirez), a
homage, of sorts, to the “Twilight Zone” original “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”
and starring Adam Scott as an airline passenger convinced his flight is
in terrible danger. Another episode, “Replay” (written by Selwyn Seyfu
Hinds) follows a mother and son, played by Sanaa Lathan and Damson
Idris, on a road trip, pursued by a tenacious state trooper (Glenn
Fleshler).
What this
“Twilight Zone” shares with Serling’s series, Peele said, is “a sense of
simplicity” — a narrative arc of heightening revelations, “and then, at
the end, the pattern is subverted or committed to even further.”
Each
episode also requires what he called “that Serling wink”: “We take
ourselves seriously but never too seriously,” Peele said. “It can’t go
so dark that it makes us want to curl up in a ball.” (This is one way
that he believes “The Twilight Zone” will distinguish itself from “Black Mirror,”
Netflix’s acclaimed anthology series about technological dystopias.
Peele said he was a fan of that show, but “it goes darrrrrrk. Dark dark. As dark as anything I’ve ever seen — and I love that.”)
There was also the matter of getting Peele to be narrator of the new show, to recite an eerie prologue over an adaptation of Marius Constant’s nerve-ruffling “Twilight Zone” theme,
dress in a Serlingesque suit and appear unexpectedly on, say, a TV
monitor or in a diner booth to deliver crucial context and moral
accounting.
Despite the
urging of his fellow producers, Peele said he worried that his comedy
résumé would disqualify him for the role. “My initial feeling was, won’t
people be picturing, like, Puppy Dog Ice-T?” he said, referring to one of his “Key & Peele” characters. “Doesn’t that take the gravity out?”
But
eventually, Peele explained, this was a situation where he felt he had
to set aside his ego and embrace the suggestions of his collaborators.
“I didn’t want
to overthink it,” Peele said. “I didn’t want to do an impression of
Serling, but I did want to conjure his tone. You can’t just do it the
exact way he did. I’ve got to be real. I’ve got to be myself.”
Themes
of double identity recur throughout Peele’s work and he’s been thinking
about them since at least high school, when he decided he wanted to be a
director and declared he would someday make his own version of “Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” (Looking at his own films now, Peele said that
“Get Out” was his “Frankenstein” and “Us” was his “Jekyll and Hyde.”)
“All
my work is pointed at this idea of humanity’s dark side,” Peele added.
“We have demons sewn into our DNA. Evolution has brought us to a place
where we want to be good, for the most part. But we’ll never be all
good. We’ll always have this other side.”
When he turned
his attention to the TV screen playing “Mirror Image,” Peele was
fascinated by the strange but economical decision to set its action in a
small bus station in upstate New York. He empathized with its
protagonist, whose truthful complaints go largely unheeded, and relished
a climactic scene in which she sees her double already sitting on the
bus she is about to board, smiling back at her through the window.
“That
little knowing smirk is so terrifying,” he said, sounding half
horrified and half delighted. “It’s one thing to see another you in
existence — it’s another thing to see another you that is already aware
that you exist.”
At
least two Jordan Peeles would seem to be required in the world to
account for the volume and variety of work that he has generated
recently. Or maybe his productivity is an act of defying his double, of
making something before his counterpart can do it first — or before he
shows up with more sinister intentions.
“O.K.,
we can deal with this,” Peele said, now chuckling outright. “There’s
innately something about a doppelgänger that suggests one of you must
die. There’s only space for one.”
Written By Dave Itzkoff
Written By Dave Itzkoff