-Congratulations. Last time you were here we were
actually talking about this film right before it came out.
-Yes, it hadn't. No one had seen it.
-Nobody had seen it. I'd seen it, I'd loved it,
and now it turns out a lot of people love it.
It's starting to win early awards
this first wave of awards. -Yes, very exciting.
-And it was Jordan Peele, the director,
who a lot of people before this knew from "Pee & Keele,"
the fantastic comedy show. -"Key & Peele."
-"Key & Peele." What did I say?
"Pee & Keele?" -Yeah, you good?
Yeah, I'm good. -Okay.
-I've taken a lot of cold medicine over the course
of this week and sometimes it makes my brain melt.
-It's cumulative, yeah, I got it.
It's okay, I'm here. -Okay, thank you.
-You're welcome. -But the movie is very heavy
at times, obviously. Not only is it a horror movie,
but talks about race a lot. -Yeah.
-But there's also great moments of levity.
And on top of that, because Jordan is so funny,
he would direct in character, is this true?
-Yeah. So, the movie is heavy.
And it's not scary to shoot a scary move,
which I learned doing this. It feels like anything else.
Everyone was like, "Were you scared?"
And I was like, "No, of Jordan?
No, I wasn't scared of him."
But the scenes got heavy. And there was this one scene
in particular, this dinner conversation
that's very fraught. And at a certain point,
we had to be laughing at the beginning.
We had been shooting it for so long and Jordan can tell
that we weren't laughing anymore.
We were just like, "Ha-ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!"
Like, it was just not convincing anybody.
And so he started directing us as Obama, and that helped.
-He does a fantastic Obama impression.
-The best Obama impression, in my opinion.
And then when that stopped working,
because he was about to leave office,
so it was started to get dark again.
[ Laughter ]
Then he started doing Tracy Morgan.
-Oh, that's the right order. Yeah.
-Which was perfect. -Yeah.
-So then, he directed us as Tracy Morgan and then eventually
we broke through the, like, tiredness and became slap-happy.
And then he was about reigning us in.
-That's perfect. -And he came back to Jordan.
But there are perks to being directed by a comedic genius...
-A sketch comedian. -Yeah, exactly --
When you're doing, like, really serious, you know,
not-so-funny organically stuff.
-It was an issue when you were on this show,
was it an issue when you did press leading up to before
everybody saw it? -Yeah.
-Because there was a lot of spoilers.
Obviously, I think of any horror film,
but particularly your character.
-Yeah. -So I do want to talk about
this now. We are going to put up for those
who still haven't seen it, first, shame on you.
We're going to put up a spoiler alert.
So just turn down the volume and when this goes away,
you can watch again. -And we won't make any
hand signals that give anything away.
-Right, exactly.
So, it turns out you're a bad guy.
[ Laughter ]
-Yes, I am.
-Yeah, really bad. -Yeah.
-Like really, really bad.
One of the worst people I can imagine.
-Yeah, I think it's hard to imagine you playing someone
more evil than you played in this film.
-I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it,
because she literally is a white supremacist
who eats cereal with the milk and the cereal separate,
and I just -- I think that might be
our world's worst person. -Yeah, that is.
-Yeah. -You're combining the two
worst things that are currently happening.
-By the way, kind of a bummer.
I can no longer eat Fruit Loops in public.
-Yeah, that's true. -It just freaks people out now.
-But you actually -- I know some magazine did
a list of things they can't trust anymore
after the film came out. -Yeah.
-And you made the list. -Yeah, I made the list.
Not my character. I am on that list.
[ Laughter ]
They can't trust me. And I don't blame them.
-Yeah. -I don't blame them.
I'll just -- I might send him a copy of "Peter Pan"
to be like, "Eh?" -You know? Yeah, right.
Well, that's true. A lot of people --
That shows your great range that you can do Peter Pan,
who never turns evil.
-No, he doesn't get old enough to become evil.
-Exactly. -He's just flying and --
-But have you had people come up to you and talk to you about
your character and actually try to justify --
-Yes. First of all, they stay about
this far away. -Okay.
-Just because, you know -- you never know.
-You never know, right? -Now I get that kind
of reaction. And as Marnie, they did, too,
because they worried I was going to judge or yell at them
or both. -Yeah.
So I'm kind of used to that. But yeah, they would say, like,
"She was hypnotized, right?" And I'm like, "No.
She's just evil. How hard is that to accept?
She's bad." We gave you so many ways to know
that she's bad. She has photos of people
whose lives she ended behind her.
The minute she can, she hangs them back up
on the wall behind her. That's so crazy.
-Yeah. -And they're still like,
"But maybe she's also a victim?"
I'm like, "No! No!"
And it's -- I will say, that is
100% white people that say that to me.
-Yeah, I was going to guess.
I was going to guess. -It was very divided, but yeah.
-I recently did -- I talked to Jordan
at the 92nd street Y where we've talked before.
It was funny because we were talking about whether or not
the movie is a comedy. -Yeah.
-And he was saying black people think it's hilarious.
-Yes.
Yeah, well, also Lil Rel is so funny as Rod.
I mean, it is kind of confusing. I've now been --
We've been doing these Q and As and stuff so I've spent a lot
of time outside of a theater playing "Get Uut."
So I, like, know what it sounds like based on the audience.
So I know that one of the cheers is when I die.
Thank you very much.
I know one of the cheers for each of my family members
and I'm so sorry if any of you guys haven't seen it.
This is terribly inappropriate.
[ Laughter ]
But, anyways -- -Yeah.
And then, but there's laughter.
So I can track where we are based on how much laughter
there is, when they're cheering. -Yeah.
-So it is weird. It's hard to put in a thing,
which Jord-- that was the whole idea is that
it's kind of every genre in one movie.
-I also -- I want to compliment your performance,
because I've seen it multiple times now.
But the first time, you miss a lot of the things
you were doing, because, of course, you're the actor,
you know that you're actually an evil person the whole time.
When you watch it again, you obviously were working
to lay in, like, warning signs.
-Yeah, I was trying to. And the nice thing is that a lot
of people get lulled into the sense of, like,
"Oh, she's just being as racially aware as she can.
She's doing her best. She's got this evil family."
And then it just, you know, when she refuses to cough up
the keys it, like, hits them with a --
You know, like a weight is falling on them.
But when you watch it again,
hopefully if I've done my job right, every smile looks weird.
Every look I give someone looks evil.
And some of that is just because you know what you didn't then.
And some of it, though, was because Jordan and I worked
really hard on that, to try to make everything look different.
And there's different motives for everything.
Like, she doesn't want the cop to take his ID because
she doesn't want to leave a paper trail for where
she's taking this guy. Or, you know, when her dad says,
"My mother loved this kitchen so we kept a piece of her in here,"
and then it pans to reveal Georgina, like the piece
they kept is her brain in Georgina's body.
Again, if you haven't seen t his move, I cannot imagine what
you are thinking right now.
They are having a full extensional crisis.
-I also realize we said we were going to leave the spoiler up
and we left it up for the entire interview.
-Yeah, exactly. -So, I'm going to take it
down now. Take down spoiler alert.
-And it's all as it appears. -As it appears.
-Yeah. -And I think this isn't
a spoiler alert. Happy Holidays.
Oh, Happy Holidays.
-And it's always so great to see you.
I'm so happy to have you here.