Jordan Peele
Jordan Peele is an actor, born 1979.
Peele spent five years on Mad TV and three more building Key and Peele with Keegan-Michael Key, and sketch is the key to everything since. A sketch has to establish a world, escalate it and land it inside four minutes. His films do exactly that at feature length, which is why the premises can be described in a sentence and the execution cannot.
Get Out (2017) changed the commercial argument about horror. Peele wrote a social thriller in which the dread is fully legible to some viewers and invisible to others until the film decides otherwise, and it won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay alongside nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Us (2019) is angrier and less tidy, a home invasion that keeps widening its frame. Nope (2022) is his best directed film: a wide Western sky, a Hollywood animal wrangler, and an argument about spectacle that the film is honest enough to turn on itself.
He works as an impresario too. He hosted and produced a revival of The Twilight Zone, has his name on Wendell and Wild and Weird City, and edited a horror anthology that won both a Bram Stoker and a Locus award. The acting career now runs largely through voice booths, in Toy Story 4, Big Mouth and Bob's Burgers.
The through line is that Peele takes genre completely seriously as a delivery system and declines to explain his films afterwards. Three features in nine years is a slow rate for someone with this much leverage, which suggests he means it.
Movies (16)
- Toy Story 4 (2019)
- Get Out (2017)
- Get Out (2017)
- Nope (2022)
- Us (2019)
- Us (2019)
- Storks (2016)
- Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)
- Little Fockers (2010)
- Keanu (2016)
- The Bob's Burgers Movie (2022)
- Wanderlust (2012)
- Wendell & Wild (2022)
- Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story (2025)
- Abruptio (2024)
- First Time Female Director (2023)
TV (18)
- Bob's Burgers (2011)
- Big Mouth (2017)
- Childrens Hospital (2008)
- Life in Pieces (2015)
- Key & Peele (2012)
- Key & Peele (2012)
- The Twilight Zone (2019)
- The Twilight Zone (2019)
- Epic Rap Battles of History (2010)
- Desus & Mero (2019)
- The Last O.G. (2018)
- Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015)
- The Shivering Truth (2018)
- Brain Games (2011)
- Weird City (2019)
- Pixar Popcorn (2021)
- Talking with Chris Hardwick (2017)
- Free Radio (2008)
Books (1)
Where to start with Jordan Peele
Get Out first, and try to arrive knowing as little as possible, because the film is engineered around what the audience notices and when. It is also the funniest of the three, which people forget.
Then Nope, which is the most confident piece of filmmaking he has done and rewards a big screen more than the other two. Us is the messiest and the most argued about, so take it third when you already trust him. Outside horror, Key & Peele is the sketch series that built the sensibility and holds up sketch for sketch, and Keanu is the affable feature that came out of it. The Twilight Zone is for completists, and Wendell & Wild is the strange stop-motion sideline.
The three films, in the order they were made
Get Out builds its tension out of social discomfort long before anything supernatural happens. Us is more ambitious and more divisive. Nope is the biggest and most purely cinematic, and the progression shows a director getting less interested in being liked.
Peele before the horror turn
A decade of sketch comedy sits behind the films, and the timing carries straight over. Key and Peele is the sketch work, Keanu is the feature version, and the voice and supporting parts show how long he had been working before Get Out.