great new cover story/interview w/ Donald Glover:
Underestimate Donald Glover at Your Own Peril
by Lacey Rose August 09, 2017, 6:00am PDT
The red-hot writer, producer, director, musician and now movie star takes a break from Lando duties on the Han Solo movie to dissect his extraordinary rise, 'Atlanta' Emmy hopes, his secret sit-down with Billy Dee Williams (in disguise) and how he plans to conquer Hollywood: "Convince them that you speak old white man."
On a crisp afternoon in late January, Donald Glover arrived for the kind of meeting his younger, nerdier, Star Wars-loving self would never have dreamed possible. Having been cast three months earlier as Lando Calrissian in the eagerly awaited Han Solo spinoff movie, he was there, incognito with a pair of shades and a fake nose, to sit face-to-face in Los Angeles with Billy Dee Williams, the original Lando, for a top-secret torch-passing arranged by Lucasfilm.
Glover found himself frazzled and running behind, as he often is, and was more than a little nervous. Once the formalities were out of the way, he threw himself feverishly into a dissection of Calrissian and his possible virtues: "I was like, 'I've always felt like this character could do this, and he represents this, and I kind of feel like he comes from here, and it's very obvious he has a lot of taste, so maybe he grew up seeing that from afar? Because I'm like that. Maybe he saw it from other planets and was like, 'I want to be that.' " Glover is full-on laughing now as he re-enacts the exchange. "He just let me ramble on and on, and then finally I was like, 'So, what do you think?' And he goes, 'Yeah, I don't know about all that. Just be charming.'
That Glover would want to search for deeper, nuanced meaning in what's effectively a caricature of a smooth-talking hustler is at once comical and entirely appropriate. After all, what distinguishes the 33-year-old — arguably the most prolific creator of his generation, racking up accolades as a writer, producer, director, rapper, stand-up and, now, movie star — is not only his unique voice and versatility, but also his desire, through his work, to get under people's skin and make them think, even if they aren't always comfortable doing so. It's been a theme of his music (he has sold more than 1 million albums under his stage name, Childish Gambino) as well as his comedy material; but the most stunning example of all came last fall with the introduction of his FX series, Atlanta, a sharply observed commentary on being young and black in today's America that merely masquerades as a comedy about rappers in the southern capital. The show seemed to come out of nowhere and quickly scored the highest half-hour ratings in its network's history, not to mention a Peabody, an AFI award, a pair of Golden Globes and six Emmy nominations, with at least a few prognosticators predicting it'll unseat perennial winner Veep come September. As the head of FX, John Landgraf, puts it, "Underestimate Donald Glover at your own peril."
Austin Hargrave
"It was hard to get FX to understand what I was doing [with Atlanta] at first. I had to, for lack of a better term, lie about it in a lot of ways because I was like, 'If you hear this, it's not going to sound good. It's going to sound crazy,'" says Glover.
When I sit down with Glover this summer in London — where he has been living since January, shooting the Star Wars movie that has had as much drama offscreen as it has had on (his thoughts on that later) — I wonder aloud what's fueling his rise. He slurps up what's left of his pea soup then attempts to explain. "I definitely have a chip on my shoulder," he says, "about things not happening the way I think they should." Or as quickly as he thinks they should. Among the first things that one notices about Glover is a palpable restlessness, a steady background hum of dissatisfaction with the status quo and an urgency to change it. This is due, in part, to his age and millennial mindset and, in part, to his upbringing and identity — each factor in its own way relevant as he claws his way to the top of an industry run by people who, at least in these areas, have little in common with him.
"I know it takes time," he acknowledges, "and you have to make people feel comfortable. You have to make them understand that you speak their language — that you speak old white man." A smile has now engulfed the lower half of Glover's intricately bearded face (a trace of Lando, I learn later), and he continues: "I often feel like those explorers who go into the Amazon and then become friends with the tribe, or like Jane Goodall with monkeys, where it's like, 'I'm just going to follow you guys around for a while and then you'll realize, Well, she hasn't tried to steal one of our babies or eat any of our food, so she can't be that bad, you guys. Let's let her see how we mate and stuff; she'll be fine.' "
Getty Images
Performing under the stage name Childish Gambino, he has earned two Grammy nominations. To date, his music has generated 2.1 billion on-demand streams in the U.S., per Nielsen Music.
That's the perspective Glover adopted when walking the halls of Hollywood back in 2013, pitching the idea that would become Atlanta, and in so doing recast himself as an auteur. "I don't think any of the executives we pitched to quite expected this idea from him," recalls his manager, Dianne McGunigle, now a producer on Atlanta. "He was coming off Community, and when you hear it in that stage, it's existential and dark." Once FX bit, Glover proceeded on his terms. He hired an entirely black writing staff, many of whom had never made a frame of television before. Eschewing an office on a studio lot, he assembled them in his Hollywood Hills home, which he ran more as a salon than a traditional writers room. Narrative conventions were upended — intimate scenes lasted several minutes, and entire episodes existed without the series' star. The director, Hiro Murai, part of a creative team that hopscotches with Glover between mediums, was hired without any series experience, and the cast was filled out not by recognizable stars but rather undiscovered talent like Brian Tyree Henry (Paper Boi) and Zazie Beetz (Vanessa). Glover's goal was less to prove that his way was better than it was to prove that there was another way.
But now he would like to be done having to prove anything to Hollywood, least of all himself. "I want to be like Spike Jonze, in a sense," he says, "where I'm like, 'I do what I want when I want to do it, and trust me because I also want to make you money.'
•••
Over breakfast in London's Camden area earlier on that same July day, Glover reveals where his talent for what he calls "world-building" began. He was raised a half-hour drive from Atlanta, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses. His father worked at the post office, his mother as a day care manager, and they populated the house — which his parents still live in — with Donald; his brother, Stephen, now a writer on Atlanta; his sister; two adopted siblings and a rotating cast of foster kids. It was, at alternating points, chaotic, disturbing and hugely informative.
"I saw kids dying of AIDS in our house," he says with a bluntness that startles me. "I saw people getting stabbed. I saw drug dealers stealing people's address books so they could get to my house because people [there] owed them money." Glover's voice trails off, and we sit momentarily in silence. In conversation, his passion occasionally overtakes his ability to be articulate, leaving him tangled in his own thoughts, but on this he's crystal clear: "I wanted to build my own world because then you get to make the world a little safer."
Getty Images
"Every time we're working on something, he's talking about something he wants to do next," says collaborator Murai, pictured just to the right of Glover (center) at the Golden Globes. "And now I see that they’re all going to happen."
His parents' faith made most of the entertainment options that his friends got to enjoy off-limits in his home. Though he and Stephen — neither of whom subscribes to the religion as adults — would sneak in bootleg audio of Simpsons episodes, their primary source of amusement was their own imagination. "We used to record all of these fake TV shows and commercials, or fake movie trailers where Donald would also do all of the sound effects," says Stephen, who, while sharing a strong family resemblance with his older brother, is quicker to laugh. (When I point this out to Donald, he smiles, and then adds: "I'm definitely more intense.")
Glover found creative outlets at school, too, always involved in a musical or a play. Stephen remembers how his brother would go missing for days or even weeks at a time, as he got swept up in writing and acting and going out to shows. "That's just Donald," he says. "He's always been doing a million things, and he picks things up really quickly." By his senior year of high school, the admissions department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts accepted Glover into its prestigious program. That he lacked the connections and privileged upbringing of many of his classmates never got in his way. "I just never saw the roadblocks," he says with a shrug.
Underestimate Donald Glover at Your Own Peril
by Lacey Rose August 09, 2017, 6:00am PDT
The red-hot writer, producer, director, musician and now movie star takes a break from Lando duties on the Han Solo movie to dissect his extraordinary rise, 'Atlanta' Emmy hopes, his secret sit-down with Billy Dee Williams (in disguise) and how he plans to conquer Hollywood: "Convince them that you speak old white man."
On a crisp afternoon in late January, Donald Glover arrived for the kind of meeting his younger, nerdier, Star Wars-loving self would never have dreamed possible. Having been cast three months earlier as Lando Calrissian in the eagerly awaited Han Solo spinoff movie, he was there, incognito with a pair of shades and a fake nose, to sit face-to-face in Los Angeles with Billy Dee Williams, the original Lando, for a top-secret torch-passing arranged by Lucasfilm.
Glover found himself frazzled and running behind, as he often is, and was more than a little nervous. Once the formalities were out of the way, he threw himself feverishly into a dissection of Calrissian and his possible virtues: "I was like, 'I've always felt like this character could do this, and he represents this, and I kind of feel like he comes from here, and it's very obvious he has a lot of taste, so maybe he grew up seeing that from afar? Because I'm like that. Maybe he saw it from other planets and was like, 'I want to be that.' " Glover is full-on laughing now as he re-enacts the exchange. "He just let me ramble on and on, and then finally I was like, 'So, what do you think?' And he goes, 'Yeah, I don't know about all that. Just be charming.'
That Glover would want to search for deeper, nuanced meaning in what's effectively a caricature of a smooth-talking hustler is at once comical and entirely appropriate. After all, what distinguishes the 33-year-old — arguably the most prolific creator of his generation, racking up accolades as a writer, producer, director, rapper, stand-up and, now, movie star — is not only his unique voice and versatility, but also his desire, through his work, to get under people's skin and make them think, even if they aren't always comfortable doing so. It's been a theme of his music (he has sold more than 1 million albums under his stage name, Childish Gambino) as well as his comedy material; but the most stunning example of all came last fall with the introduction of his FX series, Atlanta, a sharply observed commentary on being young and black in today's America that merely masquerades as a comedy about rappers in the southern capital. The show seemed to come out of nowhere and quickly scored the highest half-hour ratings in its network's history, not to mention a Peabody, an AFI award, a pair of Golden Globes and six Emmy nominations, with at least a few prognosticators predicting it'll unseat perennial winner Veep come September. As the head of FX, John Landgraf, puts it, "Underestimate Donald Glover at your own peril."
Austin Hargrave
"It was hard to get FX to understand what I was doing [with Atlanta] at first. I had to, for lack of a better term, lie about it in a lot of ways because I was like, 'If you hear this, it's not going to sound good. It's going to sound crazy,'" says Glover.
When I sit down with Glover this summer in London — where he has been living since January, shooting the Star Wars movie that has had as much drama offscreen as it has had on (his thoughts on that later) — I wonder aloud what's fueling his rise. He slurps up what's left of his pea soup then attempts to explain. "I definitely have a chip on my shoulder," he says, "about things not happening the way I think they should." Or as quickly as he thinks they should. Among the first things that one notices about Glover is a palpable restlessness, a steady background hum of dissatisfaction with the status quo and an urgency to change it. This is due, in part, to his age and millennial mindset and, in part, to his upbringing and identity — each factor in its own way relevant as he claws his way to the top of an industry run by people who, at least in these areas, have little in common with him.
"I know it takes time," he acknowledges, "and you have to make people feel comfortable. You have to make them understand that you speak their language — that you speak old white man." A smile has now engulfed the lower half of Glover's intricately bearded face (a trace of Lando, I learn later), and he continues: "I often feel like those explorers who go into the Amazon and then become friends with the tribe, or like Jane Goodall with monkeys, where it's like, 'I'm just going to follow you guys around for a while and then you'll realize, Well, she hasn't tried to steal one of our babies or eat any of our food, so she can't be that bad, you guys. Let's let her see how we mate and stuff; she'll be fine.' "
Getty Images
Performing under the stage name Childish Gambino, he has earned two Grammy nominations. To date, his music has generated 2.1 billion on-demand streams in the U.S., per Nielsen Music.
That's the perspective Glover adopted when walking the halls of Hollywood back in 2013, pitching the idea that would become Atlanta, and in so doing recast himself as an auteur. "I don't think any of the executives we pitched to quite expected this idea from him," recalls his manager, Dianne McGunigle, now a producer on Atlanta. "He was coming off Community, and when you hear it in that stage, it's existential and dark." Once FX bit, Glover proceeded on his terms. He hired an entirely black writing staff, many of whom had never made a frame of television before. Eschewing an office on a studio lot, he assembled them in his Hollywood Hills home, which he ran more as a salon than a traditional writers room. Narrative conventions were upended — intimate scenes lasted several minutes, and entire episodes existed without the series' star. The director, Hiro Murai, part of a creative team that hopscotches with Glover between mediums, was hired without any series experience, and the cast was filled out not by recognizable stars but rather undiscovered talent like Brian Tyree Henry (Paper Boi) and Zazie Beetz (Vanessa). Glover's goal was less to prove that his way was better than it was to prove that there was another way.
But now he would like to be done having to prove anything to Hollywood, least of all himself. "I want to be like Spike Jonze, in a sense," he says, "where I'm like, 'I do what I want when I want to do it, and trust me because I also want to make you money.'
•••
Over breakfast in London's Camden area earlier on that same July day, Glover reveals where his talent for what he calls "world-building" began. He was raised a half-hour drive from Atlanta, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses. His father worked at the post office, his mother as a day care manager, and they populated the house — which his parents still live in — with Donald; his brother, Stephen, now a writer on Atlanta; his sister; two adopted siblings and a rotating cast of foster kids. It was, at alternating points, chaotic, disturbing and hugely informative.
"I saw kids dying of AIDS in our house," he says with a bluntness that startles me. "I saw people getting stabbed. I saw drug dealers stealing people's address books so they could get to my house because people [there] owed them money." Glover's voice trails off, and we sit momentarily in silence. In conversation, his passion occasionally overtakes his ability to be articulate, leaving him tangled in his own thoughts, but on this he's crystal clear: "I wanted to build my own world because then you get to make the world a little safer."
Getty Images
"Every time we're working on something, he's talking about something he wants to do next," says collaborator Murai, pictured just to the right of Glover (center) at the Golden Globes. "And now I see that they’re all going to happen."
His parents' faith made most of the entertainment options that his friends got to enjoy off-limits in his home. Though he and Stephen — neither of whom subscribes to the religion as adults — would sneak in bootleg audio of Simpsons episodes, their primary source of amusement was their own imagination. "We used to record all of these fake TV shows and commercials, or fake movie trailers where Donald would also do all of the sound effects," says Stephen, who, while sharing a strong family resemblance with his older brother, is quicker to laugh. (When I point this out to Donald, he smiles, and then adds: "I'm definitely more intense.")
Glover found creative outlets at school, too, always involved in a musical or a play. Stephen remembers how his brother would go missing for days or even weeks at a time, as he got swept up in writing and acting and going out to shows. "That's just Donald," he says. "He's always been doing a million things, and he picks things up really quickly." By his senior year of high school, the admissions department at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts accepted Glover into its prestigious program. That he lacked the connections and privileged upbringing of many of his classmates never got in his way. "I just never saw the roadblocks," he says with a shrug.
