Across five seasons of the “Key & Peele” sketch comedy show, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele have been creating some of the funniest, most socially relevant laughs on television, until they pulled the plug on the show last year. What many didn’t know was that the gifted improvisation artists and Second City vets met when they were cast late in the run of Fox’s “MadTV,” from 2004-09. After works as character actors and doing one-offs on a variety of television show and films, the “Key & Peele” show kicked off in 2012, with all episodes directed by Peter Atencio, who also directed their feature film debut as stars, KEANU, which opens this weekend.
KEANU center on two best friends, Clarence and Rell, who are forced to take on much tougher gangster personas in order to retrieve Rell’s newfound kitten, an animal that has raised him from the pits of depression after his girlfriend broke up with him. Everything in perspective, people. They are put through a night of hellish criminal insanity and a whole lot of George Michael music. And no one comes out the other side the same. I saw a work-in-progress cut of the film at SXSW in March and the final version more recently (there are some actual differences between the two, including a post-credits stinger), just before I sat down to talk to Key and Peele.
Also at SXSW, I caught Key in Mike Birbiglia’s new writing-directing effort DON’T THINK TWICE, a more serious and emotionally driven work about a struggling improv troupe. And while it’s clear that Key and Peele will always look for work as a team (go back to the first season of “Fargo” for a prime example of how good they can work together in other people’s projects), they will also find ways to expand their résumés separately as well. Please enjoy my talk with Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, which shockingly took place at a no-kill cat shelter in Chicago, with sneaky felines around every corner.
Capone: So I might be the only person that talks to you today that saw this at SXSW.
Keegan-Michael Key: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Capone: You called that a work-in-progress screening, so I saw it again recently.
Jordan Peele: Very good. So you saw the cuts.
Capone: I saw the scene at the end. Were there some other differences?
KMK: There were some internal cuts too.
Capone: I didn’t even realize. But the stinger at the end wasn’t there in Austin either.
KMK: That was new, right? We put that in afterwards.
JP: Which stinger did we put in there?
KMK: When Smoke and Oil [the villains of KEANU, also played by Key and Peele]…they’re gone.
Capone: They spring back to life.
JP: That’s right. Okay.
Capone: Which to me means a sequel, right? That’s how I’m reading it.
KMK: Oh yeah. Two and three—already being written.
[Everybody laughs]
JP: There’s KEANUS, then there’s KEANU REVOLUTIONS…
KMK: The fourth one might be called CAT SCRATCH FEVER, THE RETURN OF KEANU III.
Capone: Did you mean for the film to feel like an extension of the series, or did you say “We’re going to make a movie here and do something completely different”?
JP: It’s a little bit of both. When we’re doing the show…the thing they have in common is we try to make content that showcases what we can do and is really custom made, so basically you can’t recast us.
KMK: Right, right, it’s job security.
JP: But then we didn’t want to just make a movie about one of our characters and extend that. We wanted our first movie to be really something new and fresh and have something besides just being a Key and Peele movie. And so Peter Atencio the director, he created this wonderful world.
Capone: By having him involved, though, people who know your series might think this will be more of the same, which for most of us is just fine.
KMK: He did the majority of the sketches, yeah.
Capone: The film doesn’t feel like a sketch that’s been extended necessarily. Some people might think that’s what they’re walking into. I was actually happy to see you guys didn’t play half the characters. By having Peter involved, were you worried people might make that deeper connection?
KMK: Not really. I think our hope would be that people understand that Peter’s contribution is the authenticity of the look and giving the look this kind of verisimilitude. He likes to keep things really gritty and grounded. That’s what we wanted. We wanted a nice juxtaposition to anything that would come across as goofy. It looks like an action movie. There are hard edges and grit to it. It was an exercise, really, to ask, “Can we do a narrative story? Can we play characters that are pretty much just Jordan and Keegan times five, not times 10, and let that be our additional calling card to what you’ve watched on the sketch show?” There are some trademarks in this movie that aren’t what you see necessarily on the show. There’s an element of surprise, things happening that you’re not expecting, things creeping up on you, which happens on the sketch show; it’s just that we’re not in tons and tons of makeup this time.
Capone: I think the cat has some of the most daring stunt sequences in the film. You must know it’s a great shot, because you use it in every trailer, where he goes sliding across the floor and hits the boot and over the stairs…
KMK: Hits the boot, yeah.
Capone: How did you get that shot? Or was that completely by accident?
JP: That was a total accident. That was the cat’s choice on the day [laughs].
Capone: He knew he could do it.
JP: He knew he could do it. No, I mean, we were, first of all, very careful and loving. These cats were taken very good care of, and this was a moment where we just really got gold with this little guy.
KMK: It was our APOCALYPSE NOW-Martin Sheen moment. You know, when you got drunk on his 36th birthday and did the first sequence of the movie? I remember seeing the footage for the first time, and we were like “What?” And Peter went, “Nope.” Because you can’t train a cat to do that. We’re like, “Did you…?”“No. I didn’t choreograph the cat.” But Larry and April, who were our trainers, just excellent, amazing professionals.
JP: If you put a cat in slow motion and let it do what it does, it’s amazing.
KMK: You can’t do better than that. We would never be able to do better than that.
JP: They’re so agile. My favorite thing about cats and kittens is the duality of the kitten; it’s a predator. Dogs are like pack animals. They’re goofy and whatever.
KMK: They’re social.
JP: They’re social, but cats are like these singular predators. So kittens are these adorable, violent little murderers in training, and that’s the theme of the movie.
Capone: You two are also murderers in training.
KMK: Unbeknownst to us, until the end of the movie.
Capone: Some of my favorite movies are about guys who have no set of special skills who are dropped into a situation. People are talking about this being a fish-out-of-water story, but to me it’s that thing of throwing somebody into a situation where they don’t have a choice, because if they don’t do what’s expected of them, they’ll die. I don’t know if the cat was always part of the story, but the cat solves a lot of story issues for you in terms of why you don’t run away from this dangerous situation. What was the writing like for this story?
JP: You nailed it, actually. The first draft was much more this thing that felt like this Key and Peele sketch movie, where we were put in this situation and we needed something, we needed some heart to bring us through, so the kitten came up. We actually have dogs, but we’re cat lovers as well, and I think something that actually grounds it and makes this universal is that no matter who you are, if you have a pet, you would kill for your pet. You would go walk into a violent gang if that was the only way to get your pet back. You would go to any length. I think everyone can agree with that, so it became a very realistic, grounded piece of heart to take us into a place most people wouldn’t go.
KMK: What you stumbled upon, Jordan, is that a MacGuffin with heart is better than a suitcase of gold or microfiche. That’s what you do in a spy movie is you go, “Well, if we don’t get the microfiche, the world will explode.” And you still only kind of care. But with this guy, it was a perfect way to solve that problem.
Capone: Was George Michael always the guy? Was he always the music guy in this?
KMK: No. He was not. But he ended up being perfect.
JP: When we landed on George Michael, it’s like how could it have ever been anybody else? It’s like, “Why did we go thorough all that work when we could have just started with George Michael?”
Capone: I’m not going to describe the scene, but there’s a scene where there’s a little “interaction” with you and him. Did you have to clear that with him?
JP: We did, and they were happy to do it. They’ve been extremely cooperative, and that was one aspect of the production that was as smooth as glass. His estate and him, they’ve been wonderful and flexible.
Capone: There was an anniversary edition of “Faith,” and they put out this big deluxe version. I had never owned the album, but I looked at it and said, “This looks really cool. I think I need to buy this.”
KMK: Yeah, yeah. We were auditioning music and which tracks we were going to use, and you forget what an awesome talent he is. Sometimes people go, “Oh, this and that and marketing.” And you go, “No. He actually has the voice of an angel, and that’s why he’s famous.”
JP: When it all came together, we all of a sudden realized like “Oh my god, we’ve got a movie where George Michael did the soundtrack for it.”
KMK: And there are retro aspects to the film too, a bit of the look, so it’s a nice marriage. The movie is an homage, in a way.
Capone: Can you say who else you considered for the music?
JP: We could, but the truth of the matter is, like I said, landing on him is better; it would do it a disservice.
Capone: If I remember correctly, when you announced the show was ending, it was in the middle of the final season. So for those of us who watched the show religiously, it felt abrupt. But did you always know that fans wouldn’t even have to wait a year before we got this movie?
JP: We knew earlier what the deal was. I think the network was asking us not to announce it.
KMK: But it’s just that we got to the point where it was a crap or get off the pot situation, to be indelicate. My feeling was, the movie will be the sixth season. It’s a smaller portion, but it will be the sixth season in a way. I think people expect us to do things out of the ordinary and expect us to do things that are surprising, so this is not what they were expecting. They weren’t expecting the show to go away, and they weren’t expecting it to be replaced by feature films. So it’s actually par for the course for us.
Capone: Speaking of doing things that are unexpected, over the years I saw you guys on “MadTV,” I had seen you work together and separately on various things, but when I saw you guys on “Fargo” that first season, that really floored me. I remember thinking “Oh, these guys are acting.” It was funny, but not always. It was really great. I didn’t even you were going to be in it until you showed up.
KMK: Nobody did.
Capone: Was that a big deal for you guys to be a part of that? Did that feel like a step in a certain direction?
JP: For me, it was like a homecoming, because I’m a dramatic actor who was trained as a classical actor. The funnest part was being able to do it with him, because he’s such a wonderful, subtle actor. I think some of it has to be attributed to the technique we use in the show, which is to start grounded and let it become hysterical. It’s difficult to start at a six and go to a 10. Start at a two and go to a 10, and everybody will go with you. For me, yeah, it was wonderful to go home in a way and hold his hand while it was happening, and also it was a masterfully directed and conceived piece of entertainment. Noah Hawley, who’s the EP, the creator—unbelievable.
Capone: Now that you’ve said goodbye to the show, have there been things that have happened in the last year in the world where you’ve gone, “Oh, we could have fit that in the show somehow if we had kept going.”?
JP: You know, you could drive ourselves crazy with that. Obviously, everybody would love to see some form of a Trump anger translator, which of course he doesn’t need. But it probably would be a little man living under his hair. [laughs] But no, I think that part of why we wanted to start doing movies and bigger stories is because we got to do what we wanted to do with a sketch. One thing about sketch shows that bugs me is when they beat a dead horse. We’re much happier interacting with our fans, knowing that they’re still interested in what we’re going to do next. If we had gone another couple of years, people would had gone, “Alright, you good.”
KMK: It’s a double-edged sward, right? Because you desperately want to tell them “Trust me. In the middle of season seven, everybody would be going, ‘Man, they did this before. I mean, it was in a desert, but they did this before. We see what you’re doing Key and Peele. It’s in outer space this time.’ ” Exactly. They were like, “Guys, why did you [quit]?” I’m like, “You'll thank us later.”
JP: It’s interesting, they say a real artist’s attention span with work will usually end right before it gets profitable.
KMK: Right before it gets profitable. Right. We should be poor.
JP: Yeah, and it’s true. There is something about getting comfortable in an artistic venture that is unnatural. You’ve always got to be pushing, and if it starts feeling easy…
Capone: I was going to ask, is fear a motivator for you in that sense?
KMK: Absolutely. It has to be. When I was a much, much younger actor, I used to say to myself, “The day I stop getting nervous before I go on a stage is the day I have to find another vocation.” You don’t have to be nervous that you’re going to fail, but you should be nervous for any number of reasons: “This won’t be expressed the way I want people to receive it. Or this feels hackneyed.” Maybe like you just said, maybe it was too easy and then you execute it and you go, “It was too easy. I just did what somebody else did.” Or, “Did I really find my take or our take on this thing?” I can’t remember who said it: “Art is and should always be a divine dissatisfaction.”
Capone: Artistically, did you notice any surprising differences between creating sketches on television and making this movie?
JP: You touched on it earlier, that we love to ground our comedy, but with a sketch, you can heighten through the roof in a matter of moments, and you don’t have to have a reality to come back to. So this movie, we can’t really in every scene go as crazy as we would in every sketch. You have to hold onto the base level of reality and the story you set up, so you don’t sell out your own story. So the pace has to be different. We can play and we can improvise a lot, but you have to be cognizant of the whole entire journey, so they stakes don’t get just thrown away by all, like “They just doing stupid shit.”
Capone: Are we allowed to talk about Anna Faris being in this?
KMK: I don’t have any problem with it.
Capone: I interviewed her for OBSERVE AND REPORT at SXSW a few years ago, and I realized after I saw that movie that she will do anything for a laugh, and I don’t mean stupid things; I mean dangerous things.
KMK: Dangerous, dark things. Yeah, especially in OBSERVE AND REPORT.
Capone: Exactly. And what she does in KEANU is the closest I’ve seen her do something like that since then. How did you land on her?
JP: First of all, she’s just one of those actors that I feel like everybody loves. Whoever you are you’re like, “Anna Faris? Yeah, she cool, she cool. She’s in that one movie with Chipmunks. I like that.” She’s hilarious. I haven't seen her in a movie in awhile, because she’s been doing “Mom.” So that was exciting.
Capone: That’s a dark show too. I shouldn’t underplay that.
JP: Yes, it is! And like you said, she’s willing to poke fun at herself and yeah, I won't tell you the character she plays in the movie, but she’s a sport and she’s very, very daring.
Capone: Yeah, I don’t think she gets enough credit for it, either.
KMK: No, she doesn’t.
Capone: I feel like there were a couple of scenes in the film where it was just you two bouncing off each other. I know you used do that in the show sometimes, but how much did you allow yourself to lean on that? Or did you want to make it a little more scripted than maybe you’re used to?
KMK: Well, I think that it wasn’t that we were leaning on it so much, but it goes back to what Jordan was saying, that there are places sometimes in the story where you have to go back to your touchstones, which is to say the plot, so that you’re staying on the thread of the story. But the opposite is, it’s a trademark Key and Peele thing, and you want to give some credence to what fans are expecting. You want to pepper that flavor in there too, so that there’s a good sense of them seeing our banter back and forth, what people call chemistry. Friendship is what I call it. It also, to us, appeals to a point of origin for us, because that’s how we started writing the show. We do as much work driving to lunch or driving to a meeting or driving to drop him off at home as we did at the lunch. There’s something about being in a vehicle and chatting that’s quintessentially Key and Peele.
Capone: Moving forward, how important will it be to find things that you can keep doing together. I saw the Mike Birbiglia film, which I thought was amazing. And I know you did something here in Chicago recently with Joe Swanberg.
KMK: Swanberg and Jake Johnson, yeah.
Capone: Are you still looking for things to do together? Are you developing things?
JP: Yeah, I think it’s very important. We have projects that we’re interested in alone. I’m directing and writing. I love that side of things. I don’t know if we’ll ever find a working relationship as performers that will be this rewarding. So we hope to do movies. If people go out and see this one, they’ll let us make another one. That’ll dictate.
Capone: Well, we need three or four sequels. Guys, thank you so much. It was really great to meet you.
JP: Thank you. Pleasure.
KMK: Steve, good to meet you, buddy. The Capone. Great to finally meet you.
