It looks like Jordan Peele won’t be acting anytime soon, wryly comparing it to “masturbation you don’t enjoy.”
Peele may have been hilarious performing in his sketch show Key and Peele but after moving into directing in 2017, he really hasn’t looked back. That year’s Get Out and 2019’s Us displayed a Hitchockian sense of tension alongside a 21st century understanding of racial politics that have firmly established him as one of the finest young filmmakers in the U.S..
Most of his acting since has been voice work: he reunited with old pal Keegan Michael-Key as an adorable double act that stole the show in Toy Story 4 and has also starred in Netflix’s Big Mouth as The Ghost of Duke Ellington. He’s also hosted and narrated the revived horror anthology series The Twilight Zone.
The Oscar-winner joined Get Out actor Bradley Whitford on Sunday, January 3rd, for a “Get Out The Vote” fundraiser promoting this week’s vital U.S. Senate run-off vote in Georgia, as per The Hollywood Reporter. Whitford asked Peele about his future as an actor but he was, um, blunt with his verdict on the discipline: “I like watching my movies. I can watch the films I direct [but] watching me perform just feels like, it’s a bad kind of masturbatory. It’s masturbation you don’t enjoy.
I feel like I got to do so much and it is a great feeling. When I think about those great moments when you’re basking in something you said that feels funny. When I think about all that, I think I got enough.”
2021 sees no plans for Peele’s follow-up to Us, with it instead in Universal Pictures’ release schedule for the for the following year on July 22nd, 2022. Depending on if COVID has other ideas, filming should start this year. And with an unprecedented pandemic and the the recent Black Lives Matter movement, Peele certainly has a lot of fuel to fire his filmmaking.
Check out the trailer for Us:
