He is the man who came to the couple’s rescue after Megxit and became Lilibet’s godfather. He’s also one of the most powerful men in TV and film — and the survivor of a brutal childhood. Megan Agnew meets him in Washington.
I should have known Tyler Perry would be early. By half an hour, in fact, sitting alone in the corner of a hotel conference room in Washington, hands in his lap and waiting.
Perry is one of the most powerful people in the film and television industry - and one of the richest. He is 55 years old and a billionaire (US$1.4 billion, to be precise). He has a 330-acre film studio in Atlanta, a cabin in rural Wyoming, a Bahamian island and a Beverly Hills mansion.
He has a private jet, of course, in which he flies to see his 10-year-old son, Aman, who lives on the east coast with his mother, Gelila Bekele, a 38-year-old model and film-maker from whom Perry separated in 2020. He doesn’t cook and his wardrobe is filled with 20 versions of the same clothes - “On Clouds [trainers], Joe’s jeans and black Columbia shirt, same thing every day.” To wind down, he builds radio-controlled aeroplanes in his home workshop.
At work, Perry is a director, writer, actor and producer, often all at the same time. Described by Oprah Winfrey - a close friend - as an “industry unto himself”, he has deals with Netflix, Amazon Studios and Paramount. He has made 27 movies, 20 plays and 23 television series and counting — generally kitchen-table soaps and amped-up depictions of African-American family life in the south — projects that he writes alone, over 14-hour days in two weeks flat. He doesn’t take edits. And he is always, always on time - or in my case, early. “There is no waste on my set,” he says. “There is no downtime.”
It is an extraordinary ascent that has gained him great praise, but also great criticism. People say he is too prolific, that quality suffers, that his characters are damaging caricatures. The reviews, which he rarely allows before release, are often scathing. The box office figures, however, say otherwise.
This month he has a new film out on Netflix, The Six Triple Eight, which he wrote, directed and produced. It is about the only all-black, all-female battalion in the Second World War and stars Kerry Washington. Next year he has four more films and a TV show coming out. Tyler Perry could stop. Why doesn’t he?
“There’s a different kind of hunger at 55, which is more settled,” he says today, all 6ft 5in of him sitting in a high-backed armchair, his white leather trainers box-fresh, his black-framed glasses resting in perfect symmetry. His power is not imposing but is in his stillness. A coffee table appears for his bottle of Fiji water. The photoshoot equipment is folded up silently and within minutes. His world, it seems, operates around him like a movie set.
“Can you find out what that is?” he says to a person who is still in the room. There is a tiny noise I hadn’t heard. I assume it stops. I don’t notice.
Though Perry is a household name in the States, in the UK he is unavoidably connected with his close friends the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. In 2020, after hearing they were trying to leave their temporary exile in Canada after “Megxit” and before the borders closed as a result of the pandemic, he offered them his house in Los Angeles, private jet and security team.
“I’d never met him before,” the duchess said in the couple’s 2022 Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan. “I was a wreck. I was just crying and crying. Sometimes it’s easier to open up to someone who knows nothing at all, and that was that moment with me and Tyler.” He is godfather to their three-year-old daughter, Lilibet. The duchess and Perry are clearly still great pals: she was photographed with him last week at the Paley Honors gala in LA, where Perry received a lifetime achievement award.
How did he prepare the couple for their move to America, I ask. “I didn’t,” he says, any conversational intimacy evaporating. “Meghan is from California. She knows California well. So there was nothing to prepare them for. But I will say this: what I learnt about mentioning them - because there’s this insatiable appetite to know all about them - is that any question that is asked becomes the headline of anything I say.” Why is the appetite so insatiable? “You’re from the UK, you tell me,” he says. The headlines are just as plentiful in America, I say. “You think? Well, you would know better than I would because I’m not paying attention to that world.” It’s clearly time to cut. Next scene.
Oprah - American royalty - is also one of his closest confidantes. As a child, she was his “north star”: he would watch her chat show every day. When Perry was a teenager, working as a janitor at a hotel in New Orleans, he heard she was visiting. “I vacuumed that floor all day long,” he says. “I stayed until I got a chance to see her.” When he did, he was starstruck. “She represented everything I wanted to achieve.”
Today, they speak often. “At one point in our relationship she was the big sister and mentor,” he says. “But that relationship oscillates now. Sometimes I’m the big brother and mentor, which is strange to me. This is someone who I looked up to for so long. So we call each other for advice, we talk things through.”
Now, his “extremely tight and close” group of friends includes Will Smith, the Obamas, Janet Jackson, Alicia Keys, Samuel L Jackson and Halle Berry.
“The thing that all my friends know about me,” Perry says, “and that I understand about them, is how busy our lives are. So we’re having drinks, laughing, having a great time. Pause, go to work, come back, pick right back up where we left off. Like no time has passed.”
At the core of Perry’s career and work ethic is a brutal childhood. The third of four children, he grew up in a poor neighbourhood in New Orleans. To get to school, he walked past drug addicts, dealers, “pimps, prostitutes and plenty of hard-working folks”.
“Most of my friends were in jail or murdered when I was in junior high and high school,” he says. Has he kept in touch with any of them? “No, I haven’t.”
Home was a “living hell”. The man he thought was his father, Emmitt Perry, a carpenter, beat his mother regularly, he says, as well as the young Perry. So hard, in fact, that he once passed out. “The emotional storm would build like a tornado and before long he would be crazed and violent, belittling and beating my mother. I didn’t escape his wrath either,” he wrote in his 2017 memoir, Higher Is Waiting. At 10 years old he considered suicide. At around 15 he dropped out of school. At 16 he changed his name from Emmitt Jr to Tyler, in an attempt to distance himself from his father.
“At first I wanted to be able to make enough money so my mother could leave my father,” he says. “But when I was making enough money for her to leave and she didn’t, it gave me pain and paranoia. I had done extremely well, but nothing seemed to be enough to make sure she was safe.”
Perry’s mother, Maxine, died of diabetes-related complications in 2009. His parents never separated. “She stayed with him until she died,” he says. How did his relationship with his father change after her death? “I never suffered another moment with him.” Perry has not seen him since? “No.” Do they talk on the phone? “No. But he gets a cheque every month. And he lives in a house that I’m paying for. He’s well taken care of.”
A documentary about Perry’s life called Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story was released last year. At one point in the film, the producers travel with Perry’s cousin, Lucky Johnson, to interview Emmitt, whom they approach as he pulls up to the electric gates of his home in an enormous SUV.
“Get the f*** away from here,” Emmitt says. “Get the f*** on.” Behind him is his sprawling estate - houses, towering trees and a sweeping driveway leading to a main entrance with grand white pillars - a whole life built by his estranged son. “[I’m] coming and trying to talk to his daddy, man,” Johnson says as they drive away. “That’s all.” It is shattering.
“I think people have this idea that forgiveness is about letting the other person off the hook for their behaviours, when that’s not so,” Perry says. “For me, forgiving him was about freeing myself. I’d think, ‘Why are you so angry?’ I was carrying him subconsciously in my mind.”
He often felt as if he were his mother’s only child. “All my life I felt I was out of place,” he says. After his mother’s death, he did a DNA test. It was not a match with Emmitt. He does not know who his real father is. “There was something that was ringing in my soul,” he continues. “Like, this is not where you come from. Something’s very off here, with my siblings. We’re very, very different people.” Are they in touch? “I’m not close with them,” he says. “We don’t speak often, but again, I’m taking care of them.”
He did not graduate from high school, instead flitting through odd jobs: used car salesman, bartender, shoeshiner. At 22 he moved to Atlanta, where one afternoon he watched Oprah talking about the catharsis of writing things down. He started and - in a sort of fugue state - wrote a series of letters that became his first play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, about two survivors of child sexual abuse.
Soon he realised he had written the play about himself - “it was ahead of me” - and the sexual abuse he says he suffered when he was a child at the hands of three different men, including a male nurse and a man he knew from church, as well as by the mother of a friend. In 2010 he told Oprah that he was five or six years old the first time he was abused.
Working on the play, he felt his own “shame” unfurl. “The most difficult part of it was understanding the far-reaching tentacles of all the abuse and how far it can reach into your life, into your relationships, into who you love and to how you love,” he says.
Perry ploughed his US$12,000 ($20,000) life savings into financing the production, touting it around local theatres. For seven years the audience was almost non-existent. He was living in his car. Then, in 1998 - with a new theatre and a new promoter - the people arrived. Overnight, by his account, it was a storming success with a “99.9999 per cent” African-American audience.
His next play, Diary of Mad Black Woman, was a bawdy comedy in which he dressed up as Madea - short for “Mother Dear” - a gun-toting southern matriarch largely inspired by his own mother. It made him a household name: by 2005 Forbes reported that he had sold more than US$100 million ($172m) in tickets. He negotiated a deal with Lionsgate and has made 13 Madea films to date.
In 2015 he bought a former Confederate army base in Atlanta, which he converted into movie studios. “Barack and I couldn’t be more proud of you,” Michelle Obama wrote when he opened it. “Really starting with nothing,” said Will Smith, “it’s a truly powerful American story.” In 2020 Perry was included in Time’s list of the 100 most influential people.
Today Perry owns and writes all his material solo. “If you’ve hired me to speak to my audience, then you have to let me do that.” So the platforms get the words Tyler Perry has written, no questions, no edits? “Yes.” Recently he has written Beauty in Black, a sexually explicit drama about strippers, and The Oval, about an abusive relationship between the president of the United States and his first lady.
His commercial success is not matched by reviews. Much of the criticism is directed towards his storylines, which often focus on women traumatised at the hands of men. Scripts can be disjointed and corny, and are shot more like a teatime soap than a high-budget blockbuster. The journalist Jamilah Lemieux said Perry’s shows were “marked by old stereotypes of buffoonish, emasculated black men and crass, sassy black women”. The film-maker Spike Lee blasted his Madea character as “coonery buffoonery”.
I ask him about the criticism. “What about it?” he says. I list the reviews. “I’m very clear and intentional on the stories that I’m telling.” By my count, 25 of his films have been held back from review. “I’m not spending the money for you to tear it apart. You don’t get it. It’s not written for you. The audience gets it. So let’s look at what they say.” The last time he read a review he was “probably 34” - 20 years ago.
It is an obstinate way to work, but it suggests vulnerability too. “You have to understand how I grew up. This man said I was horrible, awful, the worst of the worst. I learnt very young that what this person says about me doesn’t matter because that’s not true.”
His new movie, The Six Triple Eight, could be his “swan song”. It is a romance-slash-war film: moving, rousing in all the right places, a little trite. “After this, I’ve done everything I wanted to do,” he says. “There’s nothing else that I have on my list. Nothing. Zero.” Really? “Well, I’ve got a lot of contractual obligations to fulfil, seven more movies for Netflix.”
On Donald Trump he feels “completely fine”, despite having donated about US$800,000 ($1.4m) to the Democrats this election year and campaigning for Kamala Harris. “I’m trying to hold on to hope,” he says. He would “never” go into politics himself. “It’s a horrible, awful, awful, nasty business and I don’t think anyone should go into politics unless they have a heart for it. And I absolutely do not.”
In between work, he takes his son to football lessons or spends weekends in Wyoming with his phone off. “I want [Aman] to have as much of a normal life before people start telling him he’s my son,” he says. “I talk to him about how fortunate and blessed we are.”
Last year Perry went to therapy for the first time, a seven-day camp in Arizona where he did ten hours of sessions a day. “When your child starts hitting the ages that were trauma-filled in your life, it could trigger things. I was beginning to feel that. I went in to have a moment to just check in with myself and see, am I OK?”
Does he see himself as a solitary person, I ask. “What brings you to that question?” Well, there is something incredibly solitary about Perry. He is severed - for just reasons - from his family. He is purposefully detached from the mainstream entertainment industry and their critics. He has no business partner, negotiates on his own terms, writes entirely alone. He is the only person in a universe of his own creation.
“You have to do it your way,” he says. “And it has served me well to this point. I don’t think I’m going to change it anytime soon. That singular stance has worked.” He pauses. “I know that I’m one of one.”
After 57 minutes and 47 seconds together, I get a tap on my shoulder. It’s his publicist. Suddenly Perry is up from his chair and shaking my hand, and just like that - before I even realise it’s over - he’s out the door, on to the next.
The Six Triple Eight is on Netflix from December 20.
© The Times of London
