Director, producer, and actor Jordan Peele steals the spotlight as he graces the cover of WSJ. magazine. Peele links up with the publication for its March men’s style issue. Dario Catellani photographs the director, while George Cortina looks after styling. Just in time for the release of Us, Peele dishes on the new project. The thing I didn’t feel we were talking about in any substantive manner was race,
says Peele. With this one, I asked myself,
What are we not ready to talk about now?
And the answer for me was, What is my part in this mess?
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Peele continues, We’re living in a messy time. A dark time. And I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but what I don’t see happening enough is people looking at their own part in this dark turn. It’s so much easier to blame the other. It connects to something in human nature, and to a duality in the history and present of this country as well: this fear of the outsider. This movie was a way to say, what if the intruder is us? Maybe the monster has our face, and we’re so obsessed with some unrecognizable monster that we’ve been blinded to the real one.
The director adds, Invasion movies—whether it’s a home invasion or The Birds or UFOs—pull from fear of the outsider. Right now we’re in a time where that fear is very thick in the zeitgeist: fear of North Korea making a bomb, fear of immigrants. But we’re realizing that the terror is homegrown, too. Writing this movie, I thought a lot about 9/11. Where we are now as a culture is very connected to that scar. In the most literal ways: There’s discussion of banning people from entering this country that’s this residual trauma from that day. We have values that we claim this country is about, but we have a dark side that is the opposite of those values. I wanted to channel some of that dark space: to say that you can have invading others that are truly resorting to evil means, but if we’re not asking how we got ourselves here, from all angles, we’re doomed to rinse and repeat.
Read more at WSJ.com.
Jordan Peele WSJ. Magazine Photo Shoot
