CHICAGO — Not gonna lie, Dewayne Perkins, the multi-hyphenate entertainer (comedian, writer, actor, producer) has been on the Tribune’s radar for quite some time.
Critic Nina Metz has followed his trajectory ever since seeing him as part of the nine-member 3Peat improv group at iO Theatre in 2016. And according to Perkins, that was the same year that “The Blackening” was born in a sketch while Perkins was at The Second City.
For those unaware, “The Blackening,” makes fun of the old horror movie trope of the Black character always being the first to die, but flips the script of that by making all the characters in the spoof Black. The set of friends have to decide among themselves who will be sacrificed to the killer to save the rest of the group — the catch? The chosen one has to be the “Blackest” person among them.
What started as poking fun of the comical nature of horror movies, human reactions, and horror movie tropes that don’t favor people of color, turned into a Comedy Central sketch video in 2018 and is now a full feature film, in theaters this week. Perkins said the sketch was the joke that launched his thousand ships in the entertainment industry.
“It really has ... snowballed into more than I ever thought it could,” Perkins said during a visit to Chicago promoting the film. We sat down with the native South Sider, a Curie High School/DePaul University graduate whose least favorite Kool-Aid flavor is grape, to talk “The Blackening” and learned how it ties to Perkins’ idea of legacy, self-love, and his future in entertainment. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: This film hit all the main horror genre points without it being too cerebral, a la Jordan Peele, or too slapstick, a la Wayans family work. How did you walk that line?
A: That was very intentional. We did not want to create something that had too deep of a meaning, but we also didn’t want it to be as broad as “Scary Movie.” We wanted to create characters that felt real and grounded, but were in situations that were innately horrific, and then use comedy to bring levity to it. I think in doing so, we did create something that felt unique. And that was the intention — we didn’t want to recreate something. We wanted to push the genre to include this new thing. It’s very interesting ... a lot of people are comparing it to either Jordan Peele or “Scary Movie” because that is what we’ve been given. The idea of “The Blackening” being added to that lexicon as a new film, is that we can then stretch what we think this genre could be. It’s all very exciting.
Q: What are you most scared of?
A: I have a general fear of lack of control. I still have anxiety on films because I have to put my safety in the hands of a pilot that I don’t know. I’m fearful of being too delusional. Like ‘I lost grasp of my humanity. What if I lose myself and I don’t have enough know-how to get it back. Very existential fears — those are things that I fear.
Q: You were a writer on “The Amber Ruffin Show,” someone who in other interviews you mentioned as being influential in your career. Are there any other people that you’re itching to work with?
A: There’s a running list. Of course, Jordan Peele, I loved him from the beginning. We’ve had a career that I thought has been very similar — from sketch to The Second City to now horror, it’s just been a lot of similarities. I look up to him a lot. I say that I want my career to be like a marriage of Jordan Peele and Kenny Ortega because I also have a deep love for musicals. Being able to submit myself as a genre-agnostic creator and do whatever they want is the goal. I’m really interested in working with similar people like Issa Rae and Mindy Kaling, people that have really solidified themselves in the zeitgeist as creators. I think it’s most important to work with my peers and people whose voices we have not heard. I think that is the most exciting movement that the industry can go is by absorbing and adopting as many new voices as possible. Because that is what makes good art.
Q: What is one question you wish someone would ask?
A: It’s something that people have asked me and I just feel there should be a different way to ask it. I did a screening in Alabama and a woman asked ‘how did you feel during this process?’ She wanted me to walk through my emotional journey going through the ups and downs of the film. She wanted to hear what it’s like for ... a dream that came true and it took this amount of time. I thought that was such an interesting way to put it because she was like ‘you have to have a kind of delusional way of thinking about life to aim for something that you’ve never experienced or knew was possible.’ I was trying to remember what it was like, what I was going through: ‘this thing happened and I felt this way and this didn’t happen and I felt this way.’ Then I got emotional ... I got to the part of the cast and crew screening and how that moment made the movie so much bigger than me because I got to talk to the crew about how this movie changed their lives. They were like: ‘This film helped me get into the union, this helped me do this thing.’ Then it became this thing to really see the power of one choice that I made. I wrote a sketch in 2016 and to jump to this point and see the impact of that, I think that there is a lot to be asked around what that feeling feels like. Because that’s a brand new feeling. I go through ups and downs personally all the time but to create something that affects other people was very profound to me because I never saw it as that.
Q: You’ve been doing comedy for a while now, including stand-up, you never thought your comedy was profound or outside yourself enough?
A: Selfishly, I do comedy for myself. I was never doing stand up like my job is to make you laugh. My job was ‘I’m good at this, laugh so these people could get me a job.’ My art is for me and in that moment, “The Blackening” was no longer about me. It wasn’t like, ‘I made a movie. It was ‘this movie gave things to so many people.’ It became a part of life that had a bigger reach and impact than me writing a thing. And that for me was the first time I felt like I had a legacy ... creating something that has impact that is bigger than you are. That was that moment where I said this movie is gonna come out and no matter what, it already had legs that have affected people’s lives. If I died today, this is my legacy. That was the first time I felt it.
Q: You have a kind of centeredness that you could teach the next generation, have you thought about doing that?
A: I recently did a free, online Master class for OTV because I’m obsessed with getting any information that gets new voices into the fold. I’ve recently started supervising the development of TV shows, and it’s been so fulfilling for that reason. Being able to shed that light on people ‘hey, this actually a little bit easier than you thought or here’s something that you think you might have to worry about, but you shouldn’t,’ took away that fear. There’s so much fear in the unknown. And just giving people the knowledge that they can move, knowledgeable without fear and move with confidence ... I do think that is key to success.
Q: Did you get this centeredness through support of family and friends?
A: I think it was a combination of being a queer Black man who had a speech impediment that was reliant on his anxiety. I’ve had speech therapy for a very long time because I had a really bad stutter as a kid. And that stutter was a manifestation of my emotions. If I was in an environment where I felt unsafe, my body would go into fight or flight and I would literally not be able to speak. With time, I realized that the environments that I’m in, dictate how I act, how my body is literally able to be free. And also being queer and closeted, that was a similar parallel. Those spaces are in turn allowing me to not talk. I’m literally silencing myself by not being who I am. Learning that at a very young age and realizing how that connects to adulthood, I came out of the closet pretty young, because I was like, ‘this is not gonna work. If this continues, I will never be a real person.’ And I really wanted to be a real person. As a teenager, I realized that if I come out I could lose a bunch of people so I had to really love myself because I knew that there was a real chance that the love for myself is all the love I could have. I can’t force people to love me, so I have to focus on one thing that I can do and that is love myself. That helped me throughout life, choosing myself first.
