Buckaroo Banzai’s journey to the big screen was almost as convoluted as the movie
20th Century Studios
Getting “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” to the screen was a long and complicated process, not helped by its writer’s mercurial approach to putting a screenplay together. Initially paid $1,500 by W.D. Richter and his wife to pen a script, Earl Mac Rauch enthusiastically launched himself into one story about the hero (initially called “Buckaroo Bandy”) before abandoning it and starting all over again with a different concept. By his own admission, Rauch dumped around 12 screenplays featuring wacky ideas, including a giant robot and a box of Hitler’s cigars.
In the meantime, Richter was building up his reputation in Hollywood, most notably writing the excellent 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (one sci-fi remake that is better than the original) and receiving an Oscar nod for his “Brubaker” screenplay. In 1979, Richter teamed up with Neil Canton (who would later produce the “Back to the Future” trilogy) to form their own production company. Richter decided that “Buckaroo Banzai” would be the perfect project for him to make his debut as a director, but the pair realized they would need a completed screenplay if they had any chance of a studio stumping up the cash to relative unknowns. That meant getting Rauch back behind the typewriter and actually finishing something.
That something was a new Buckaroo Banzai adventure called “The Lepers from Saturn,” and it took Rauch until 1982 to complete a script. That was just in time for the Writers’ Guild of America to call a strike and shut down Hollywood. Eventually, the project was funded by 20th Century Fox, who handed Richter a handsome initial budget of $12 million. It would still take Rauch three more drafts before cameras eventually rolled with a workable screenplay, not to mention a 300-page tome called “The Essential Buckaroo” as a kind of reference book containing all the lore that Rauch had come up with previously. “Buckaroo Banzai” was finally a go picture, but the production was hampered by the presence of producer David Begelman, who didn’t get it at all and continually interfered (Richter referred to him as “our enemy for the entire movie”). To Begelman’s credit, however, he was responsible for the joyous end credits sequence with Buckaroo and his friends walking along the L.A. River.
What makes Buckaroo Banzai so special?
20th Century Studios
A synopsis for “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” doesn’t do full justice to the experience of actually watching it. On the surface, it’s an offbeat sci-fi comedy with the familiar grain of a mid-budget, mid-’80s genre movie, but it has an attitude and a style that sets it totally apart. Key to the film’s left field vibe is Peter Weller’s performance as Buckaroo Banzai. Weller’s approach to finding his character was suitably unconventional, drawing from the diverse likes of Elia Kazan, Albert Einstein, Jacques Cousteau, Leonardo da Vinci, and Adam Ant as inspirations.
Weller’s unflappable Zen mystique as Banzai (“No matter where you go, there you are”) is wonderfully contrasted by John Lithgow’s utterly bonkers performance as Dr. Emilio Lizardo, who goes big with his outrageous Italian accent and bizarre mannerisms. They are supported by a colorful supporting cast including Clancy Brown and Lewis Smith as members of the Hong Kong Cavaliers; Ellen Barkin as Buckaroo’s quirky love interest; and Christopher Lloyd as an alien going by the name of John Bigbooté (pronounced “Big Booty”), because all the Red Lectroids are called John. Last but not least, Jeff Goldblum is another neurosurgeon who likes to be called “New Jersey” and wears a cowboy outfit. His quirky acting technique fits perfectly here, and “Buckaroo Banzai” definitely goes down as one of the best Jeff Goldblum movies.
“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” revels in its own weirdness and the peculiar tone makes it totally understandable why some viewers simply wouldn’t get it. The film takes itself at least semi-seriously (there aren’t many outright jokes or winks to the camera), but a lot of the goofier elements play like a live-action cartoon — indeed, I was surprised to find out that it wasn’t based on a comic book when I first saw it. If the film has a fault, it’s that it gets a little repetitive in the last act when it morphs into a slightly more conventional sci-fi action movie. But the first hour is an absolute hoot as we get immersed in the wild self-contained world of Banzai and his pals and it’s a super-stylish flick, too, championed by Los Angeles Magazine as “the moment geeks became cool.” If that sounds like your jam, you can catch up with it now on Pluto TV.
by admin | Jun 30, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles
one of Eastwood’s best films as both an actor and a director, and there really isn’t another film like it that fully digs into its themes. But there is another Western that is just as fantastic, and it stars another Western movie legend.
If there’s another actor as tied to the Western genre as Eastwood, it’s Kurt Russell, who has starred in a whole bunch of fantastic Westerns over the years. And one of the best of the best is “Tombstone,” which stars Russell as real-life lawman Wyatt Earp. It’s a terrific drama with absolutely stunning cinematography, featuring views of gorgeous Arizona vistas, and it does deal with some of the same difficult life-or-death brutality as “Unforgiven,” even if it’s a bit more of an adventure than Eastwood’s grim classic. After all, “Tombstone” is based on a true story (even if it’s not entirely historically accurate), so it has to reckon with some of the more unpleasant elements of the time period.
Hulu’s your huckleberry if you want to watch Tombstone
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
“Tombstone,” which stars Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn, and more in addition to Russell, is a rip-roaring time at the movies that features some of the most quotable lines in the whole genre. Like “Unforgiven,” it deals with how people handle a harsh, almost lawless world, where violence seems to regularly be the only form of communication. As Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and his friend Doc Holliday (Kilmer) try to deal with the vicious outlaws that call themselves The Cowboys, it becomes a brutal and bloody battle to the death for many of them. Not every protagonist who starts “Tombstone” survives to the end, and their deaths make “Tombstone” more poignant and resonant.
Fans of “Unforgiven” who want to check out “Tombstone” for the first time or the thousandth time can do so on Hulu, Disney+, and Peacock. Sure, “Tombstone” might not tackle Western revisionism the same as “Unforgiven” and occasionally leans into its John Ford, classic Hollywood influences, but it’s still one of the best Westerns of all time and is a perfect pairing with Eastwood’s incredible film. (“Unforgiven” currently isn’t available to stream anywhere unless you want to pay to rent it, though it’s probably worth it for this wild west double feature.) Russell’s second-best Western, “The Hateful Eight,” is available on Netflix, if you want to really have a perfect movie marathon of post-classic Westerns. Just be careful when checking out “Bone Tomahawk,” also on Netflix, unless you’re prepared to see something in the genre take a truly brutal new turn. Now that’s a subversive Western.
by admin | Jun 30, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles
“Star Trek: Lower Decks” was a 30-minute animated sitcom version of “Star Trek,” set shortly after the events of “Star Trek: Voyager.” That show lasted a successful five seasons before coming to a close in 2024. While “Lower Decks” was in production, Paramount also launched “Star Trek: Prodigy,” a CGI-animated series produced by Nickelodeon. That show was meant to be more kid-friendly than other “Star Trek” shows, and featured a cast of teenage characters. That show lasted two seasons, spread over 2021 and 2024.
As for the other two animated “Star Trek” shows, there may be some debate as to their taxonomy. The stop-gap anthology series “Short Treks” ran for two seasons from 2018 to 2020, and, as the title implies, was constructed of short, independent stories within the Trek universe. Two of the shorts in the show’s second season were animated, so that may count as an animated series unto itself. “Short Treks” then, in turn, gave birth to the all-animated series “Very Short Treks,” a new anthology series of brief, crass, non-canonical comedic cartoons. That series ran for five episodes in 2023.
How do these animated shows rank? Let us slip into our judge’s robes and make some tough calls.
5. Very Short Treks
Paramount+
The “Very Short Treks” series was created by Casper Kelly, the mastermind behind “Stroker and Hoop,” “Too Many Cooks,” and the Cheddar Goblin sequence from “Mandy.” Kelly clearly has a twisted sense of humor, and handing him “Star Trek” is like handing a handkerchief to a hay fever sufferer and then asking them not to get any mucous on it. Of course, Kelly created one of the silliest — and dumbest — “Star Trek” projects to date, mocking the franchise relentlessly, and doing so with the participation of many of the show’s various cast members.
The idea behind “Short Treks” was to pay homage to “Star Trek: The Animated Series,” which turned 50 in 2023. Kelly animated all his shorts in the style of “Animated Series,” which was produced by Lou Scheimer’s famous Filmation studio back in the day. Kelly, however, was clearly not interested in traditional “Star Trek” stories about exploration and diplomacy, nor was he interested in making small character studies of well-known Starfleet characters. Instead, he created aliens with underwear heads. He made a species that considers it polite to wipe boogers on visiting Federation officers. He created a character named Ass Face.
“Star Trek” can certainly stand some irreverence, as its main characters tend to be stuffy, ultra-formal, uniform-wearing diplomats. And goodness knows I love a good booger joke or Ass Face gag. But I don’t know what the heck this is. It knows enough about “Star Trek” to make inside jokes, but it also seems to hate the series. One might say that “Very Short Treks” is all in good fun, but that would only be true if it were fun.
4. Short Treks
Paramount+
When “Short Treks” debuted in October 2018, it seemed to have a mercenary function. At the time, the first season of “Star Trek: Discovery” had just come to an end, and its planned second season wouldn’t debut until the following January. CBS All Access (not yet named Paramount+) clearly wanted to keep subscribers on the hook until then, so the network seemingly rushed “Short Treks” into production, releasing one short every few weeks, just far apart enough to keep the monthly subscription fees renewing. The shorts were clearly very low-concept, and most of them were filmed on mostly empty “Discovery” sets, usually with only a few actors on hand.
Few of the shorts are standouts, and they didn’t get truly creative until later in the show’s run. In the second season, “Short Treks” ran its first animated episode, called “Ephraim and Dot,” directed by noted composer Michael Giacchino. The short followed the adventures of Ephraim, an outsize spatial tardigrade, as it infiltrated the tiny tunnels in the hull of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It was pursued by a repair drone, Dot, that aimed to eject it. Thanks to a few glimpses through portals, Ephraim was inside the Enterprise during the events of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.”
The second animated episode of “Short Treks” was called “The Girl Who Made the Stars,” and was directed by Trek regular Olatunde Osunsanmi. This one was about a young Michael Burnham (the main character from “Discovery”) listening to an old African folk tale told by her father. It has very little to do with “Star Trek” and is only okay.
Indeed, most of “Short Treks” is only okay. Despite its fitful moments of ambition, it always felt a little mercenary, done for financial reasons instead of creative ones. It never had the thrill of something like “Liquid Television,” and never added importantly to Trek canon. You can skip it.
3. Star Trek: Prodigy
Paramount+
The beleaguered “Star Trek: Prodigy” was infamously canceled while its second season was in production, and unceremoniously dropped from Paramount+ altogether. The show was eventually picked up by Netflix, which aired its second season, but many Trekkies wondered why “Prodigy” warranted such harsh treatment. Was it the CGI animation? Was it because it was aired by the kid-friendly Nickelodeon? Was it the elongated story arcs? It’s hard to say.
It could have been because “Prodigy” started out in a very non-“Star Trek” place. At the start of the series, the main characters — a group of runaway teenage slaves — had never heard of Starfleet before, and had never encountered a Starfleet vessel. In the first few episodes, though, they find an abandoned ship called the U.S.S. Protostar, board it, and are instructed on how to use it by a hologram of Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) of the U.S.S. Voyager. Despite the “Star Trek” iconography, the villains and action made “Prodigy” feel more like “Star Wars.”
Over the course of the series, however, the teen runaways — operating at the behest of the hologram Janeway — began to think of themselves as a crew that had to work together and employ their personal expertise in creative ways. By the end of the first season, they are all in Starfleet back on Earth, happy to have outgrown their dark past. “Star Trek,” the show argues, is better than “Star Wars.”
The second season was an even more elaborate story about time travel, retrieving the Protostar from villains, and reuniting many old, familiar faces. The show seems shaky at first, but quickly becomes pretty great. It didn’t deserve its fate.
2. Star Trek: The Animated Series
Paramount
If one were particularly daring, one could rank “Star Trek: The Animated Series” even higher than the original “Star Trek” series. Gene Roddenberry oversaw its creation, and many of the original show’s writers returned, this time unbound by the limits of live-action special effects. The show’s animated medium suddenly allowed “Star Trek” to become truly alien, featuring impossibly crafted starships, aliens with multiple limbs, underwater episodes, and a visit to the planet where Satan lives (yes, really). Also, because the series was only 30 minutes (as opposed to the original show’s one-hour time slot), the writers had to be more efficient in their storytelling, allowing plots to unfold more naturally and engagingly. Some may find the following statement heretical, but there was less extraneous character stuff.
The biggest problems with “Animated Series” are that it cut corners as often as possible, leaving a lot of the animation static and dull to look at. There are many extreme close-ups of characters’ faces where only their mouths are moving. Backgrounds are reused to a noticeable degree, and the exact same three music cues can be heard again and again and again. “Animated Series” could get creative with its aliens and visuals, but they didn’t really move around a lot.
Still, the writing was sharp, and many of the episodes dealt with heady themes and weird sci-fi ideas just like the original “Star Trek.” Its two seasons can likely count as the final two years in the U.S.S. Enterprise’s five-year mission — which only took eight years to complete.
1. Star Trek: Lower Decks
Paramount
Prior to its release in 2020, “Star Trek: Lower Decks” started out on the wrong foot. It sold itself as a comedy version of “Star Trek,” which wasn’t what Trekkies wanted at that time. You can’t undercut your own franchise’s seriousness from within, Paramount. That was the job of satirists. And indeed, the first episode of “Lower Decks” wasn’t very good, stressing a flippant, “Family Guy”-style sense of humor inside the “Star Trek” universe. Things didn’t bode well.
But then “Lower Decks” got to its feet and took off at a sprint. Its premise was novel, in that it was a series about the undervalued, lower-ranked officers on a starship, the ones who have all the crap jobs. Additionally, it took place on an unimportant Starfleet vessel, the U.S.S. Cerritos, that never took care of terribly important missions. “Star Trek” is a vast universe undergirded by a complex bureaucracy and a fleet of grunt workers, all of them required to make sure that a utopia can be achieved. For ensigns, though, it doesn’t always feel like a utopia. Sometimes it feels like you just have a s***ty job.
The brilliance of “Lower Decks” came, though, as its main characters began to grow. Ensign Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) liked people to think of her as a rule-breaking firebrand, but she is eventually interrogated about her behavior, and she reveals some serious insecurities at work. The series develops naturally, all while remembering that these people have terrible jobs and screw up more often than “Next Generation” characters. It’s one of the best Treks of them all.
by admin | Jun 30, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles
big flashy belt buckles, and tight pants. According to Jessica Radloff’s 2022 book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” Helberg and the show’s costume designer Mary Quigley worked extremely hard to create Howard’s unforgettable look, which did evolve over time … even if they encountered some strange technical issues at the start.
“Howard’s look was so bold that by the time I stepped out onstage wearing that outfit, I knew who this guy was,” Helberg recalled to Radloff before telling her that there were some amazing wardrobe malfunctions initially. “I think there were a couple pairs of jeans that I needed assistance with because they were so tight, particularly around the calf,” he said. “There was some buttering up of the thighs to get the pants off.” Heberg explained that in the pilot, Quigley had to make a unitard turtleneck because the clothes he wore were so small that he thought the turtleneck was probably for a six-year-old. Understandably, it didn’t stay tucked into his pants. “She had to sew on a diaper with snaps that would basically hold it in place and prevent it from coming undone,” he said.
Understandably, Helberg was a little worried about this intense process at first, but once he and Quigley figured it out, it was smooth sailing. “I thought if the show picked up, this is going to be a long go. But eventually we found some turtlenecks from the long and tall kids department and we could tuck them in,” the actor revealed. “And then to get all those sharp belt buckles so close to so many vulernable parts, plus the tight pants, and the pin on my turtleneck that would jam into my neck … I was always trying to get used to being smothered by my own wardrobe. But it was also negative twenty degrees in the studio when we would shoot, so it kind of went a long way.”
The Big Bang Theory’s costume designer Mary Quigley took inspiration from a Hollywood legend for Howard Wolowitz’s fashion sense
CBS
“Wolowitz’s look was certainly out there at the time,” Mary Quigley openly told Radloff in the book. “In the way he was written, he thought he was the suave one. If anyone had a closet full of different clothes, it was him.” The turtleneck Howard wore was his odd interpretation of how Clark Gable used to dress on hiatus between films, because as Quigley tells it, Gable used to wear white turtlenecks with a white sweater over his shoulders with white pleated pants. As for his colorful skinny jeans, the inspiration was pulled from the looks of The Beatles and The Monkees, which inspired Howard’s signature mop-top haircut. “He thinks he’s kind of a rock star.” (Quigley’s joke here is particularly funny when you consider that, at one point, the series almost cast a rock star as Howard’s absent father.) “Sometimes I’d get the jeans at Urban Outfitters, but I also dyed a lot of white jeans because I really wanted a saturated color,” Quigley concluded.
Still, there’s one specific piece of Howard’s costume that Quigley and Simon Helberg will never fully explain, and that’s Howard’s signature pin in the shape of a little alien. “The reason why Howard wore the alien pin is between Simon and I, and never to be told,” she told Radloff. “Simon and I swore we would never tell anyone why we did it. But there were lots of different alien pins because I had multiple colors depending on what he was wearing. And then the belt buckles were an example of his flashiness.”
When Radloff asked Helberg if the alien pin was there for a “fascinating reason or just silly,” Helberg coyly told her, “It may be a little bit of both. That’s all I’ll say.”
Howard’s style changed throughout The Big Bang Theory, except for one important feature
CBS
Throughout “The Big Bang Theory,” Howard evolves both as a character and just as a human being, particularly after he meets and settles down with the girl of his dreams, Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch). According to executive producer and writer Steve Holland, the show made this clear in Howard’s costumes. “Howard basically wore the same thing, but we tried to pull away from the bright, bright colors,” Holland said of the character’s sartorial growth. “It was almost subtle enough that when we were doing an episode in season [11], if we showed a flashback, you could see him in those bright green lime pants, which we had kind of gotten away from… just small changes to let the character grow up a little bit.” Mary Quigley added, “He also began to wear slightly more muted plaid shirts instead of tight T-shirts over the turtlenecks.”
There was one thing that never changed about Howard, though, and that’s his helmet-style hair. “It was kind of unspoken that I would never do anything drastic to my hair, so it was always possible to achieve Howard’s look,” Simon Helberg said to Jessica Radloff. After acknowledging his co-star Kaley Cuoco’s surprising hair transformation before the season 9 premiere of “The Big Bang Theory,” Helberg continued, “But they never did tell us that we couldn’t do anything; it was just sort of expected that when we came back from summer hiatus, we had the same look. I’m sure I could have lobbed to change it, but I felt like it was very specific to him and he would never see any reason to upgrade that style. They flat-ironed it and sprayed it to keep it in place. It had a little movement, but I just wanted it to look like a solid block of hair that you’d find on an action figure or something.”
“The Big Bang Theory,” including all of Howard’s signature looks, is streaming on HBO Max now.
by admin | Jun 30, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles
Eastwood made the then-controversial decision to star in “Every Which Way but Loose” opposite a trained orangutan named Manis. The action-comedy saw him and his co-star travel across the United States in search of a woman Eastwood’s character has convinced himself is his soulmate — and wouldn’t you know it, the movie was a hit, spawning the 1980 sequel “Any Which Way You Can,” which saw Eastwood and his ape buddy team up once again. The sequel wasn’t quite as successful and took a drubbing from critics. But its star had already proven he could handle comedy with “Every Which Way but Loose,” which represented a big change of pace for an actor who’d started the decade playing rugged rogue cop Harry Callahan in “Dirty Harry.” Regardless of how the sequel performed, then, audiences had already responded favorably to Eastwood playing against type, and he thereafter dabbled in more lighthearted fare.
Unfortunately, not every comedy Eastwood fronted after that hinge moment in his career performed as well. Take 1989’s “Pink Cadillac,” in which the veteran star portrayed a bounty hunter with a proclivity for elaborate disguises. The action-comedy saw Eastwood re-team with “Any Which Way You Can” director Buddy Van Horn and, once again, the results weren’t great. Critics did not take kindly to the movie, though it did at least give us an undeniably funny scene in which the gruff Eastwood encounters a young Jim Carrey doing what the comedian does best.
Jim Carrey and Clint Eastwood’s brief on-screen collaborations
Warner Bros.
Jim Carrey and Clint Eastwood actually crossed paths for the first time in 1988’s “The Dead Pool,” one of the worst of the five “Dirty Harry” movies. In this final film in the franchise (unless you count the spiritual sequel “Gran Torino”), Carrey can be seen playing a heavy metal frontman whose most memorable scene involves lip-synching to “Welcome to the Jungle” in a music video homage to “The Exorcist” directed by Liam Neeson. (You might be starting to understand why the film was received so poorly.) Carrey doesn’t last long in the movie and doesn’t have any scenes with Eastwood, but he’d get another chance to work with the veteran star a year after “The Dead Pool” debuted.
In “Pink Cadillac” Eastwood’s Tommy Nowak tracks down Bernadette Peters’ Lou Ann McGuinn, who has skipped bail and absconded in the titular vehicle along with some money belonging to a group of white supremacists. He finds her in a casino and sits down at a table while a comedian performs on-stage in the background. That comedian is Carrey, who can even be heard delivering an early rendition of his now classic Ace Ventura line “Alrighty Then” in the film.
As Nowak and McGuinn chat, the camera cuts to Carrey doing his schtick, which, in this instance, is an Elvis tribute performed with his arms tucked inside his shirt. Eastwood scowling at Carrey prancing around on-stage is inarguably funny and seems to represent exactly how the actor would feel if he encountered Carrey’s antics in real life. It very much has the same energy as Tommy Lee Jones’ famous rebuke of Carrey during the filming of “Batman Forever,” in which he told the then-young star that he could not “sanction” his “buffoonery.” In this brief scene in “Pink Cadillac,” that’s pretty much what I imagine Eastwood is thinking. Sadly, the rest of the movie isn’t as funny.
We should have gotten a full Jim Carrey/Clint Eastwood team-up
Warner Bros.
“Pink Cadillac” was the third collaboration between Clint Eastwood and director Buddy Van Horn, who, aside from directing “Any Which Way You Can,” was also responsible for “The Dead Pool.” That’s not exactly the finest contribution to Eastwood’s celebrated oeuvre (though Carrey’s music video performance in the latter is one of the greatest “Dirty Harry” movie moments), but at least with his 1989 action-comedy the filmmaker had finally succeeded in bringing Eastwood and Jim Carrey together in a single scene. Otherwise, “Pink Cadillac” was mostly dismissed by critics, though some found it charming enough.
The movie fared only slightly better than the 20% score for “Any Which Way You Can” on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 24% critic score based on 21 reviews. Roger Ebert found the movie dull and its tone uneven, writing, “There’s little that’s new in the material, and nobody seems to have asked whether the emotional charge of blatant racism belongs in a lightweight story like this — even if the racists are the villains.” Similarly, Caryn James of the New York Times described the film as “the laziest sort of action-comedy,” with “lumbering chase scenes, a dull-witted script, and the charmless pairing of Mr. Eastwood and Bernadette Peters.” If anything, it would have been better to team Eastwood with Carrey and let the two clash throughout — especially since one of Carrey’s best early impressions was of a “Dirty Harry”-era Eastwood.
Still, some were quite taken by “Pink Cadillac” with Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader seemingly having seen an entirely different movie. He wrote in his review, “As a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action-comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.”
by admin | Jun 29, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles
If you don’t recognize Danie Kaluuya from “Black Mirror,” you probably remember him from Jordan Peele’s blockbuster directorial debut “Get Out,” which changed the game by spawning a whole spate of social thrillers in its wake and even encouraging college professors to build courses around the film. Kaluuya plays Chris, a guy who visits his white girlfriend’s family home only to discover a house of unexpected horrors. So how did Peele find him?
“It was ‘Black Mirror,’ Peele told Deadline in 2018 when he and Kaluuya discussed the film together. “I had this immediate feeling of, how is this guy so good and I haven’t seen his work before? The way I can best describe it is, he showed the full range of the two opposite sides of Chris. Different characters, different emotions. The character goes from being quiet, introspective, subdued, with a relatable sense of compliance to the system, and then by the end he explodes and is primal. In the ‘Black Mirror’ episode, he showed it in just monologue, this primal, frugal, passionate monologue that just feels like a Greek tragedy. And so I knew I needed somebody who could do both of those things, and either one of those, he does better than anyone else.”
Peele said that while he personally knew Kaluuya was the man for the role, he needed to bring him in to audition anyway, and he performed the now-famous “hypnosis scene.” According to Peele, it was unbelievable. “It was a beautiful moment, it was undeniable,” he recalled. “You could see he doesn’t do anything for the sake of doing something. His specificity in what he chooses to do, you could tell he was into some good, interesting s***. One of the things that really stood out to me was, he understood the risk of ‘Get Out’ and instead of it pushing him away, it drew him closer. I felt like we had this bond of like, holy s***, they’re going to let us make this movie? We’re going to do things you’re not supposed to do in this movie and it could go very wrong.”
The rest is literally cinematic history, and it’s safe to say that nothing went wrong once Peele and Kaluuya teamed up. Not only did the film score Oscar nominations for Kaluuya, the overall film, and nods for Peele for directing and writing (the latter of which he won in the Best Original Screenplay category), the actor and writer/director reunited in 2022 for “Nope” to create even more movie magic. It’s lucky, then, that Kaluuya booked this role in “Black Mirror,” or we may never have gotten his performance in “Get Out.”
