Some folks mention The Chant, that rising sound that builds as the large man in the tribal mask walks out into sunlight: Mayafa! Ya hoo hoo! Mayafa! Ya hoo hoo! Others talk about The Laugh, the one that follows a threat that he will feed the talkative man before him to his children only to admit that they are vegetarians and punctuate the joke with the ultimate Im just fucking with you, man guffaw. (The little snort he throws in there is a nice touch.)
But if you ask Winston Duke, hell tell you its probably The Bark that he hears the most. Ever since Black Panther turned the 32-year-old actor into an oh-my-god-who-was-that-guy? breakout star last year, hes had folks come up to him and do it. In the film, Martin Freemans government agent is starting to say something about TChalla, the newly crowned Wakandan king, when Dukes character, MBaku, interrupts him with a glare and a loud, deep arrooff. Soon, hes joined by a whole chorus of similarly intimidating baying.
When he would go out in public right after Black Panther went from Marvel blockbuster to global pop-culture phenomenon, Duke would get the occasional salutary, crossed-arm mafaya and punchline recitation. The bark, though? For a while, it happened a lot, he says, sticking a spoon in a bowl of oatmeal and berries. Barking in the street. In restaurants. At the gym. He doesnt mind. These things take on a life of their own. They dont have time to give you a trophy. So thats their award to give out. They are telling me: You made an impact. Thats their celebration of you.
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Review: Jordan Peeles Us Is Terrifying
Theres a sound that Duke makes in Us, however, that will probably not inspire fans imitations. Jordan Peeles new horror film revolves around a family that goes on vacation with some friends; the actor plays Gabe, a sort of bumbling, amiable patriarch. Then, late one night, they are set upon by a gang of house invaders that threaten their lives each of these perpetrators being exact doubles of the family in peril. Duke plays the dads counterpart as well, a man named Abraham. This doppelganger cant talk. So Peele asked the actor to come up with a noise for him. He went into the scene in question not knowing what exactly he would do; much like the conception of The Laugh and The Bark, he says, it happened in the moment. Jordan told me, I want something guttural. Something primeval,' Duke recalls. I just opened my mouth and let something come out.
If you were among the many, many, many moviegoers who saw Us last weekend and helped turn Peeles follow-up to Get Out into a huge box-office hit right out of the gate, you know what it sounded like. If you havent seen the film yet, the noise is like a cross between an inchoate howl and a hellish moan. Theres something spooky yet unbearably, unfathomably sad about it. When we meet to talk, the movie wont be opening for another few days. And as were sitting in a hotel restaurant, surrounded by people drinking tea and staring at their phones and politely discussing the weather, Duke starts doing the sound. To hear this in person is absolutely blood-curdling. Its not nearly as loud as Abrahams initial cry in the film, but its enough that folks stop their conversation mid-sentence. We get a few looks. One woman almost drops her scone.
I didnt know what it was until I did it, he says, thumping his chest softly for emphasis. But the intention was always clear. It was: I want your voice. I. Want. To. Speak!
All Duke has wanted to do since becoming an actor is have a chance to speak to engage, as he eloquently puts it, in a conversation with the culture. You could argue that this need started much earlier than that: before he got bit by the acting bug in high school; before he began studying theater at the University of Buffalo; before he got into Yales acting graduate program; before he started doing TV roles and wowed Ryan Coogler with his Black Panther audition and became famous enough to get barked at. Duke himself might say it began once he moved to Brooklyn and tried to figure out where a nine-year-old kid from Trinidad and Tobago fit in this new country he was living in. Television helped. So did the movies.
I keep going back to those movies that I grew up with, he says. The ones I loved I realized later on that they asked me a question and I answered. As a kid, I had no idea thats that what I was doing. I was just attached to really interesting what ifs: What if a mermaid grew legs and met a really good guy? Thats Splash. What if a patient who had AIDS needed to be defended in court by a man who didnt understand the disease and comes from a cultural background that stigmatizes it? You have Philadelphia. A pause. I realize I just gave you two Tom Hanks movies, didnt I? Hes one of my heroes.
So, theres probably a little bit of the nice-guy movie stars DNA in Gabe, the goofier paternal figure in Uss dual equation, right? Hes the first of Dukes characters we meet in the movie the kind of father who sings along to Lunizs I Got 5 on It in the car, who practically pratfalls into his new boat, who tries to clumsily seduce his wife Adelaide (Lupita Nyongo) by lying spread-eagle in his boxers on their bed. Was Splash-era Hanks his inspiration? Homer Simpson, he says, laughing. I didnt grow up with a father in the home, so what were the dads I knew as an immigrant boy from Trinidad? That was Uncle Phil in Fresh Prince. That was Carl Winslow [from Family Matters]. That was Homer Simpson theres a lot of Homer in Gabe! It was, lets make him the dad from black-ish: really loving, really present, but a little aloof in other respects.
Duke consciously wanted to make this Mr. All-American Dad U.S.A. a bit of a doofus, partially to contrast how Nyongos suburban wife would slowly turn into a protector: The thinking was: If I lean this far in one direction, youll see how far in the other direction Adelaide goes. Its like, this is what the films action hero can look like. Its what she should look like. But he also wanted to underline the fact that this was a man who seemed to have everything and that may be part of the problem. A big part of Us revolves around the notion that, even if we are not guilty of directly exploiting those on lower rungs of the economic ladder or who we might otherwise categorize as the other, we may still buy into a system that sometimes passively, often actively seeks to keep folks down. The movie is not called Them, hes quick to point out. There may be blood on everyones hands, even those not holding sharp, oversized scissors.
It comes from a space of being totally disconnected from an experience thats different from your own, Duke says. And the sense of entitlement, that was something I wanted to emphasize. Hes not a bad guy, but hes not a good guy, either. There are no good guys here.
You know, Gabe Wilson is attached to the American Dream, he continues. He wants the boat and the summer house. He and Adelaide are not the ones that committed a sin, but they are the ones paying for it. Youve attached yourself to the materialistic things, the trophy wife. Youve attached yourself to the American Dream now are you ready for the sins that come with it to show up at your door, looking just like you?
And that brings us to Abraham. Yes, that brings us to Abraham, Duke says, nodding. He eyes the recorder on the table in front of him. This article is coming out after the film gets released, right? Good. Then lets talk about Abraham.
When Duke was auditioning to Yales theater program, he was assigned a sort of tour guide a student whod show him the school and help him get oriented as he navigated the interview process. So when he arrived from New York to the Ivy League university in New Haven, Connecticut, he was met by a well-traveled young woman who already had professional experience on film sets and a reputation as a fierce performer on stage. Shed be his handler, for lack of a better term, for the whole weekend. Her name was Lupita Nyongo.
Lupita Nyongo on the Mysteries of Jordan Peeles Us
The first thing you noticed about Winston was his size, she says, via telephone. Hes a big guy. And not just physically he has a big personality, too. But you could tell he was a really pensive person as well, and the combination of those two sides of him was immediate from the moment you met him. He had not made the program yet, mind you; he was one of the shortlisted candidates and had got a callback audition when I was with him around the campus. But he was already clear about what he wanted to accomplish. You sensed he was an absorbant actor even then.
Though Duke and Nyongo didnt act together while they both attended Yale, she says she kept a close eye on him in the two years together in the program; he still refers to her as my upperclassman Lupita. He watched as she went on to win an Oscar for her work in 12 Years a Slave. She watched as he nabbed a few recurring roles in shows like Modern Family and Persons of Interest. They both talked on Desus and Mero about seeing the first Avengers movie together, and she had already been cast in Black Panther when director Ryan Coogler called Duke in to read for MBaku. Cue were vegetarians, numerous barking incidents and a leveling up in the industry-juice department for the actor.
And it was Nyongo, Duke says, that invited him as her date to the Oscars, where he happened to see Jordan Peele lounging around during a commercial break. I remember seeing Get Out and spending three hours discussing the movie with my friends afterwards, he says. Just talking about black bodies, gentrification the gentrification of black bodies! Theres a lot of meat on the bones of that movie, and a lot of marrow to suck out once you break the bones open. He introduced himself. They exchanged pleasantries. When they ran into each other later at an afterparty, they chatted some more. Then, three weeks later, Peele called him.
He told me, I have this project,' Duke recalls. Im not gonna tell you anything about the script, let me know what you think. Let me know if you wanna be a part of it. And then I read it, and its just I saw all these tentacles in there that reached out and touched so many topics. So many isms class, the patriarchy, everything. I said, Jordan, I need to be part of the conversation here, and not as a passenger. I have to be in the drivers seat with you on this one. Lets get to work.'
The first thing Duke had to do was bone up on his Horror Movies 101. Not a big horror fan growing up, he admits. I had no real experience with it, because I never really saw people who looked like me have a chance in horror movies. Its a cliche, but: Were the first ones to go usually. Were the sacrifice. Blackness its the genres first martyr!
So Peele gave him a list of films to check out. And it was the inaugural selection Stanley Kubricks adaptation of The Shining that Duke says proved to be the key that unlocked the door. It was something I could lean into because, for starters, I could see the similarities to the movie I was going into. You know, theres a family at the center of it, both the house and the hall of mirrors sort of become characters, the boardwalk becomes a playing space similar to the maze in the hotel. But more importantly, it was: Oh wow, thats a great way of making a monster out of something very familiar. A father figure whos familiar yet foreign to the family. I wanted to play with that. Enter Abraham.
When we first meet the Wilsons shadow twins, Adelaides counterpart, Red, is distinguished by a voice that sounds like the door of a crypt being forced open. (No one knew that this was the choice Nyongo made for the character until they did the scene. You dont talk about the plumbing with the other actors, she says, laughing. You just compare notes on what the house youre building should look like.) The other members of this makeshift family, however, are more or less silent. In Dukes mind, this patriarch would have been denied what he calls a proximity to privilege, so the first thing hed lose would be his voice. Hes less a husband than a partner in their purpose for being there, Duke notes, in relation to why these doubles have shown up a mutually beneficial mission that makes him part of a team. Hed be tough. And hed be almost blind.
Both Gabe and Abraham are products of their environment, Duke says. Abraham has been living lets say underground. So, for his introductory scene, when you see him enter the room, youll notice hes touching everything. Hes unable to see, so I thought: Well, hes very deliberate, and he hears perfectly. It makes him a lot more of aware. He knows where everyone is in the room at all times. Gabe sprays everywhere; Abraham takes in. Any oppressed person will tell you they become a lot more of aware of how powers structures work. And anything he gets a hold of say, a baseball bat he doesnt let go. When he finally gets his hands on something, thats a means to survival. That idea told me how strong hed be. Hed never let go of anything.
The gory bits, they last six seconds. But stabbing something like our class system in the jugular? That stays. Thats the last shot of Us.
Still, as they were blocking the sequence, something was not quite coming together. And then, in the middle of a take, it happened. Duke, in character as Abraham, reached out to the stand-in actor playing Gabe. He felt his face, then felt his glasses. And Abraham takes the glasses and puts them on. Suddenly, he can see everything his family, the Wilsons, an entire other life thats been denied him. Thats when the painful, guttural sound comes out. And thats when Abraham becomes enraged.
The glasses were completely improvised, yeah, Duke says. Completely in the moment. I think Jordan might have gasped behind the camera when it happened. When we filmed that, I remember turning around and actually seeing the new family for the first time. This is what my kids look like, this is what my wife looks like. And it hit me: This is the moment when it all actually makes sense to him. When he sees the light, both figuratively and literally, for the first time, and thinks, Oh, this is right! Its the moment I really felt like I could relate to him. I have a lot of compassion for Abraham. I never thought of him as a villain, you know. Because he isnt. Duke stops talking for a second. Then his eyes began to get a little glassy. Hes on the verge of tearing up just thinking about the character. He really isnt.
And the other thing is, he says, fanning his eyes and leaning in, its the moment things stop making sense to Gabe. He thinks theyre here for his money. Take the ATM card, take the boat, just dont hurt my family. No, man. Were here for your family. Were here for your freedom. Were here for your glasses. Duke leans back. This is the kind of thing that Jordan does. You know, the gory bits, they last six seconds. But stabbing something like our class system in the jugular? That stays. Thats the last shot of Us. Thats the conversation.
And its taking part in those conversations, Duke says, finishing up his breakfast, that keeps him pushing forward. Hes already got more work ahead of him: Wonderland, a take on Robert B. Parkers Spencer: For Hire novels costarring Mark Wahlberg; probably a Black Panther sequel; possibly a biopic of MMA fighter Kimbo Slice. But Us is the sort of stuff he wants to keep doing now that hes starting to have the luxury of choosing projects, of having folks coming to him. Duke can put up with the barking. He just wants to make work that bites. I used to be the one answering the what ifs,' he declares. Now I get to be the one who asks them.
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