Daniel Kaluuya Admits He Was Ready To Quit Acting Before Landing The Lead Role In ‘Get Out’: I Checked Out

Daniel Kaluuya

Daniel Kaluuya Admits He Was Ready To Quit Acting Before Landing The Lead Role In ‘Get Out’: I Checked Out

Daniel Kaluuya almost called it quits on his acting career.

Actor Daniel Kaluuya, 33, recently revealed he was ready to give up acting before he was granted a lead role in ‘Get Out’ by film director Jordan Peele.

Jordan Peele said it was Daniel Kaluuya’s work in the 2011 “Black Mirror” episode “Fifteen Million Merits” that made him want Kaluuya to audition for “Get Out.”

While chatting with the famed director, Kaluuya admitted that the iconic role inspired him to not pursue another career. He said,

“I’ve never told you this, but when you reached out to me and we had that Skype, I was really disillusioned with acting. I had stopped acting for like a year and a half.”

Kaluuya had been working as an actor since 2006. After his role in the 2015 film “Sicario,” he went a year and a half without working and considered quitting acting during that time.

He continued:

“I checked out, because I was just like, this isn’t working. I wasn’t getting roles, because racism and all this kind of stuff—so you reaching out was like, Okay, I’m not crazy. It’s proper. It’s going to be all right.”

Peele replied:

“I was just so thrilled to realize what the rest of the world considers a very small pool. I had at least one of the best actors I’d ever seen in my movie, and from the very beginning I was like, this is how—when you have a script that’s good, and you get an actor like this, who has done work but has untapped potential and an untapped trust put into him—you get something special.”

Jordan Peele

Kaluuya continued:

“A ‘f*ck yeah’ to me is when you’re doing plays, you’re doing it for 400 pound a week. That’s pre-agent, pre-tax, pre-everything.”

Kaluuya added:

“So I was like, Would I do this for 400 pound a week? And if the answer was yes, then all right, cool, I’ll do it. I want to go into places that I don’t know I can. I want three-dimensional characters. I want to tell the story, no matter how big or how small.”

As previously reported, Kaluuya and Peele are a duo that the film industry needs today. Peele said that he intends to continue a partnership with the actor. Peele compared their relationship to director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro, whose films ranked among the greatest films of all time.

Daniel Kaluuya, Jordan Peele

Peele said:

“It’s so funny, but by the point I was in the middle of shooting Get Out, that’s what I was telling him. I was like [makes serious eye contact], ‘You’re my De Niro, man. You’re my De Niro.’ I was like, ‘I need you to be in the future ones too, man!’ You could just tell what we had in him as a performer, from the very beginning.”

Peele continued:

“We do have a bond. The first big movie he was a lead in, and my directorial debut, was Get Out. And we bonded because we went through that together. In the beginning of that, it feels like two people who have faith in each other, then by the end, it all works. So I just couldn’t wait to further that relationship and explore a completely new character with Daniel.”

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