Once again, a Jordan Peele project has been met with critical acclaim as Nope is poised to become his next big hit. Peele has evolved from his successful sketch comedy career into becoming the next great horror filmmaker, and he has found a muse of sorts in Daniel Kaluuya. The actor burst onto the Hollywood mainstream scene as the star of Peele's Get Out, and he's returned once again with a stellar performance in Nope.
Kaluuya's career also includes blockbuster hits like Black Panther and Judas and the Black Messiah, but Get Out was the film that helped put him on the map. In a sit-down with Peele for Essence magazine, Kaluuya admitted that just prior to landing Get Out, he almost quit the business altogether.
“I was really disillusioned with acting. I had stopped acting for like a year and a half. I checked out, because I was just like, this isn’t working,” he said. “I wasn’t getting roles, because racism and all this kind of stuff—so you reaching out was like, 'Okay, I’m not crazy. It’s proper. It’s going to be all right.'”
Peele replied: "It's wild because even while making a movie in 2016, we were looking for a lead Black actor and realized there's not a lot who have been given opportunities to be the lead of a film. I was just so thrilled to realize what the rest of the world considers a very small pool. I had at least one of the best actors I'd ever seen in my movie, and from the very beginning I was like, this is how—when you have a script that's good, and you get an actor like this, who has done work but has untapped potential and an untapped trust put into him—you get something special."
Check out the featurette for Nope below.