It pushed audiences of all stripes to embrace a young black man’s perspective, launching national conversations about race, even as its terrifying limbo, the Sunken Place, entered the culture as metaphor, meme and nightmare.

Get Out was a layer cake of subtextual meaning, directed with Hitchcockian precision - a thriller in which every single white character turns out to be evil, as a weekend of micro-aggressions escalates into the attempted removal of part of the hero’s brain. It would be unwise, given his career trajectory, to doubt him. “It’s my ongoing joke - ‘You have to be this color or darker to enter.’ I don’t know how they would do it.” He pauses. On his way into the faux-Hogwarts, which hosts a ride called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, Peele grins at a 48-inch-high sign warning “You must be at least this tall to ride.” “I’ve been trying to pitch a Get Out ride,” he says. As always, though, his is a critical, tough-love fandom, ever attuned to race and class, to the untold flip side of the story: An incisive sketch on his old Comedy Central show, Key & Peele, centered around a desperately underfunded inner-city wizard school where the junior magicians resorted to riding Swiffers instead of broomsticks. Even the part where two dudes dressed up as the Blues Brothers came out and sang “Shake Your Tailfeather” was pretty exciting.Īt 39, Peele is too old to have grown up on Harry Potter, but as a lifetime connoisseur of all things fantastical, he’s adopted the franchise into his pantheon. “I still have that feeling when I come back.” His mom, an office manager who raised him on her own on New York’s Upper West Side, was never able to afford a Disney trip, but she did have a work event when he was 12 that scored them a couple of days at Universal in Orlando - which, for a movie-obsessed kid, felt like a real taste of showbiz. “This is the kind of shit that I just loved as a kid,” Peele says, en route to Universal’s re-creation of quaint, cobblestoned Hogsmeade, the village where Hogwarts kids take magical study breaks.

Quit or Die Trying by Alison Beard