Tyler Perry
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Which is very important to understand because you can make yourself insane trying to figure out what has happened. Why is affecting me in this way? I've had very few sexual partners at 55 and people go, oh, my God, you're this huge guy, really successful. You're all over the world. No. Not me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I do believe that all things work together for your good, even though if they're awful and horrible, I have to believe that. Which put me in a wonderful position in running the studio, because when you have people coming to you with their dreams in their hands and they need a job or want to be on a show, if I had been another person, then maybe I would have been doing things that were horrible.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
But because of what I went through and because of how much I understand the pain of that, I would never inflict that on anybody. So it put me in this great position to help as many people as I could safely hit this next level in their lives. Right. Yes. So all of that is incredibly important to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. And that happens. I had a friend who had been sexually abused and he had hundreds of partners. Yeah. Well, at the same time, he was abandoned by his mother. So you could give him 10,000 females and it wouldn't fulfill what he was looking for. Yeah. And he and I finally sat down, had some real deep conversations about what's going on.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I even hired a private detective to try to find the mother that abandoned him. Oh. So that he could talk to her. I was thinking that hopefully that would help him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. There are people who go to these incredible extremes. You can go that way where everything is sex. And then you go the other way where, for me, I didn't want to be thought of as sexy. Being tall was a problem because when people would see me, they'd think, oh, this tall black guy, the stereotype or whatever that is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So carrying all of that and trying to walk through and work all of that out was a journey for sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
There was one woman who I was completely in love with. I was in my early 30s at the time because I wasn't very experienced. I felt less than. Inadequate. Inadequate. And that was something that made me shy further away and back into myself of going, OK, I don't want to be judged based on my lack of experience because of what I've been through.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. So at 54, this happened. Past summer, I've been thinking about it for a while. It's like, OK, Tyler, you've worked this hard. You've got this beautiful kid. You've had this amazing life. What happens when you're not working? Why aren't you happy when you're not working? Because the work became the drug and the adrenaline.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So to take that moment and stop the work and say, OK, let's go and look inside and see what's happening and see the full effect. This program I did was so fantastic. Before you go in, there are thousands of questions that you answer. So they have a clinical profile of who you are mentally walking in the door. For me to walk in and be confirmed in who I thought I was, was so freeing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
To have all of these therapists, I think it was nine that I saw in total, because it's a very intensive thing for seven days, 10 hours a day. And then you sit in the room and all the therapists talk about you and you listen.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Oh, wow. And to hear them talking and affirming the good person that I know that I am and the issues and the way to work through them. Was very freeing for me. This one woman I love, she would say to me every day I walk in because when you go through these profiles, it's like, do you drink? I was like, I have drink on occasion. Have you ever done any drugs?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And I know I tried this pot when I was 40. Didn't really like it. I have a gummy every now and then. But if I get too weird, I don't like feeling out of control. But they were fascinated because I'm not an addict. That's shocking to me. You were like an 80 percent chance of being an addict. And that's exactly what they were saying to me. And there were these group sessions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I'm going, I'm not going to be in these group sessions, man. I'm Tyler Perry. I don't know about this. And she said to me, there have been people who've come here who were famous, who did not do the sessions and came back to do the group sessions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So I was in the group with these wonderful people who had shit that they were dealing with to sit in and hear their stories and made me find the commonality. There was a through line for all of us. And I think that for all of humanity, man. As much as I'm excited to be here talking to you, my hope is that by sharing this, somebody hears something that goes, maybe that's what I'm dealing with.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And we grew up in a time where you could not talk about it. No. Because if you said anything, you're gay. And being gay at that time was a horrible, taboo thing. I'm so glad we're at a place now where people can just be themselves. Yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
There was a kid recently, I don't know a lot of younger singers and performers, but he was singing on stage and I saw him talking about his sexuality, trying to figure it out. And my heart went out to him because he's so young. And what I wanted to scream was, look into the arousal template, figure out what happened, walk it through so that you're clear in a sense of this is what happened.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And also, there's so much shame. You have to chase the shame down of what that feels like. And that's the thing that freed me just to look at it like I am ashamed of the why. And also understanding that was not my fault. I did not deserve that. They gave that to me and it wasn't mine to carry.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Here's the thing that I've been trying to work through the most, as long as I have been dealing with what they both gave me to carry, it has denied me the ability to love freely, openly, And be in a relationship that is healthy and whole for a very long period of time. Yeah. I have another friend on a guy's trip in Jackson.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
We're sitting around talking and he's talking about how when he was six, his older brothers were making him have sex with these women. And he's laughing and he's joking about it. He's laughing at everybody around the table. They're all making jokes. And I'm quiet. And I'm just like, guys, I'm sorry. I got to challenge you on this. He's like, no, no, no, no.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So when we got to a moment where we could talk in private, he broke.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Because I had him look at his child. I was like, is that OK for your six year old? And then it's like, whoa, because you realize you've been judging the child that you are through the lens of your adult life. It's so misleading. For sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
For me, most of that carnage was driven by dudes. My mother was the balance for everything for me, and she wouldn't let me see things one way. She worked at a Jewish community center for most of my childhood, she would educate me about what Jewish people went through. My mother just would not let me see things one way. So I wouldn't lean toward one group or one sex of a group.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I always base people on, are you a good person? And I have a really good sense of people, which came from that childhood of being hypervigilant. When I walk in, I'm like, hmm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Are you like... I'm not skeptical. I'm immediate on what I feel. I don't talk myself out of what I feel.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. And also the understanding of what we had to survive and how our brains taught us. It's like a deer drinking water. They're always looking up. They can't just drink the water and relax. I drove into my property the other day and there was one laying down. I had never seen a deer lay down. And the deer was laying there and looked at me as I just rode by on my bike and never got up.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And I thought, what a great place to get to in life where you can just lay down in a green pasture and just be okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I don't know if I always have, but what I know I do is work myself to exhaustion. So the sleep is good. But I also do know how to stop and check in, see if I'm OK, go away, get quiet. I like to be alone. I'm a loner by nature. I could spend days and weeks and months in the mountains by myself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I got put out of high school and had to go to PM high school to get my diploma. It was a high school that was at night after school for adults and people who got kicked out of school. Right, dudes who were smoking cigarettes in the parking lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. I was looking through some things recently and I ran across one of my old journals. From that era? Early 2000s. And I opened it up and I started reading and I just sat there. I was reading for hours. I called Oprah. I was like, listen, go pull out your journals and read some of the stuff you were going through 20, 30 years ago. It was so spiritual. I was in tears.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
It's like you had written your own Bible of the things that you had come through. And to go back and look at them and see how far you've come was so beautiful to me. So I would tell anybody, journal, write, and then go back years later and see.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah, I was just like, oh, I hope the show works. I don't know how I'm going to pay this light bills $3,000. I go back and look at those things and go on. look at where you were. I'd come through being homeless. So I was writing it from the point of view of where I was and not where I was going. Understanding where you're going is so much more important.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I've learned to build for where I'm going rather than where I am. And looking back on all of that stuff and reading all of those moments and those memories, it really was powerful for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
OK, so you started at what age do you think? 18 or 19. I was watching the show and I started journaling and I didn't use my name because at that time we wouldn't talk about the things that you and I just talked about. Right, right. I would use these different characters and a friend of mine found them and goes, man, this is a really good play. And I thought, hmm, maybe it is a play.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
What I write about is this character went through this. I was talking about adult survivors of child abuse and rape and molestation. So I moved to Atlanta. Prior to that, did you ever fancy being a writer?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I definitely wanted to be an architect. The man that raised me was a builder and I wanted to build houses. But when I wrote this, I always loved entertainment, but I never thought you can audition. You're trying to be invisible, not center stage. Yeah. So having my friend encourage me and doing that first play and seeing people, the 1,200 that I thought would show up and only 30 did. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Having the 30 people's reaction to the show speak to me in my soul, I was like, whoa. So that sparked something for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Hurricane Katrina literally blew the roof off the poverty that was in New Orleans. Mardi Gras was amazing. And the tourists are on Bourbon Street and St. Charles Avenue. And it's beautiful and it's amazing. But two blocks behind those mansions is where we were in the ghetto with drive-by shootings and police brutality and murders. And it was just insane.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So some friends of mine invited me to Freaknik, which is the Black Spring Break. Black kids went to Atlanta. White kids went to the beach for Spring Break. I don't know what that's about, but... I got there and while everybody's partying and dancing and drinking and I'm realizing that I see black people doing well. I'm from Detroit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And I think I'm probably six years older than you. Five. Yeah. So you get it. And being a black person and never seeing a black person be successful unless it was a pimp or a preacher to come to Atlanta and see their doctors, their lawyers, they're in suits. A full middle class. I'm home. So I loaded up my Hyundai and move right to Atlanta. You put up a play.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
But no, it was the same show. And every year I would try to do it, it would fail. But there was somebody in the audience out of every show, this is what I call a ram in the bush, who wanted to invest in it every time. The most I saw was probably 1,400 people in New Orleans in a theater that sat 3,000. But out of that, somebody said, well, let's keep this going.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Because during this time, there were a lot of plays, these black shows that were traveling the country and making lots of money for black people. It was on something that's affectionately called the Chitlin Circuit. The rename's weird. Urban... There's a rename? Yeah, they rebranded it. Oh, well... Kind of like Aunt Jemima. You have to rebrand it. I'm just going to call this shit what it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
The chilling circuit is when black performers could not perform in white establishments. They would travel all over the South into all of these different places and become famous among their own people. So here I am doing this play in the early 90s. and hitting some of these spots where black people were allowed to go everywhere.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
But the spirit of the Chitlin' Circuit was still there where black people supported each other. And for my play to not work all of those years, then in 1998, take off one night. So the play itself didn't change all that much. It didn't change. You know what changed? The play was about adult survivors of child abuse who had forgiven their abuser because it was a happy ending.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
They all forgave the abuser, the woman who did all this stuff to them. And I hadn't forgiven my father. So it was hypocritical that I'm in this seat and I'm talking about forgiveness and it hadn't happened for me. So in 98, he and I got into a really heated argument, the man who raised me and I forgave him. And that is when the show changed. Oh, wow. It was spiritual for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I went from nobody being in the audience to having eight sold out shows after I forgave him. And the forgiveness was such a scary thing for me because I didn't realize how powerful it was for me. It was my anchor. You're with me. What are you thinking? You got something on your mind to say?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
The ripping away of my anger toward him was like a car that kind of runs on gasoline. Then all of a sudden you fill it with diesel and say, go be motivated. Because everything I was doing, every time I was trying to work, it was like, I'm going to make some money. I'm going to take care of my mother. I'm going to prove to you that I am something because you said I wasn't shit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Once that was gone and I forgave him, it didn't matter anymore. I had no motivation to keep going, even though the purest sense of where I started was about making enough money to take care of my mother so she didn't have to be with him. So forgiving him ripped that from me. I had to figure out, OK, how do you operate now? I also found this out in therapy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I shifted from the anger to caregiving, and I did not know that my caregiving was a problem. Is the caregiving still an attempt to be safe? The caregiving is an attempt to save everybody else.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I would expect that if I'm kind to you, you'll be kind to me or you'd be kind to somebody else. However, it doesn't work that way. However, yes, I let all that go years ago. I gave up expectations, which was a problem.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
That's the same. Wow. I gave up expectations because I thought if I'm good to this person, if I'm kind to this person, if I'm doing this and they give me their ass to kiss or just become horrible, then I'm going to feel bad because they did that rather than going. I'm just going to be good to you whether you do whatever you want to do or not. You do what works for you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I'm just going to be good to you. Right. For me, for me, because my entire life was based on the anger and now I've shifted. So I've got to do this for me. But where it became a problem, and I could not wrap my brain around this when I first started talking to these folks, they were saying, Tyler, caregiving is a problem. I'm like, how is that a problem? It's such a good thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
It's a problem if you're using it to cover what you're dealing with. So I was caring for everybody else. So I wasn't dealing with what I was dealing with or going through.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
This is beyond suspicious. I have a tremendous amount of people who need a lot of help.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
That's incredibly kind. Thank you, Monica. I appreciate it. It's good when people will acknowledge it and say it. So it's really great. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I set limits on how far I'm going to go. I'm going to help you to this point. And you've got to get up and be on your own because I'm not going to let you be dependent on me for everything. And then they get angry because of where you stop.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I've seen that, of course. Yeah. But listen, it's OK. It's not OK, but it's life. You keep moving. You deal with their anger, whatever way it comes. But I always know my intention. My intention is pure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
There's another option there because I found this out because I was helping so many people and they just kept coming back, kept coming back. Oh, I need this. I need that. I was praying about it. I clearly hear this voice, which I believe inside of me to be the voice of God. It's like, stop. You are blocking a midnight. And I thought about that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I went back and looked at what midnight represented in the Bible. Sometimes God designs midnights for people to go through. And if you run and rescue them all the time, you're not making them better. You've robbed them of the thing that would make them better. That might change them. Or be that thing that gets them up and gets them on their feet and gets them going. The catalyst.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
What is going on? Yeah. But I was a kid asking my mother all of my life. Remember asking, is he my father? Her answer would always be the same. I hate to tell you this, baby, but he's your father. I asked her on her deathbed, is he my father? Same answer. I hate to tell you this, but he's your father. It's 15 years ago this week that I'm dealing with this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So I'm a little emotional as I'm thinking about it. When she died, it didn't sit well with me. So I did a DNA test with my brother and I. DNA test comes back, we don't have the same father. So I'm like, OK, well, one of us isn't dads. Yeah, but I knew he was his. He is his spitting image, everything, his attitude, his voice. So then I do another test with the man himself and I'm not his child.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And if I could wake my mother up for five minutes, I'd be like, hey, can you just tell me? Because what I want her to know is. Is that I wouldn't judge her. She was 24 years old. This man was beating the shit out of her. She was in misery. And if there was a man that loved her, hooray for her. That makes me smile and happy to know that somebody loved her because of the way he was treating her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. Any moment of comfort you would want for her. Yeah. But on the other hand, my mother was deathly afraid to be in the house by herself. There's a story of her being home alone with my two sisters. I wasn't born yet. And she was screaming and banging on the wall. It's a double house for the neighbors to come over and help because somebody was trying to break in the house.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
That's all I know about the story. I don't feel that I'm the product of a rape, but because I have all of these looming questions that are out there, I wish she had just told me if she knew.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
That's right. My mother was an extremely kind, giving and loving woman, but she's also very, very private. So I want to give her the dignity of what she believed. But I knew it from childhood. Isn't that weird? Yeah. And it wasn't because of physical resemblance. No, it was just, I could not understand how this man could look at me with such hate. So you believe he knew as well? Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And then there were clues. I think I was probably in my late teens, early twenties. They were sitting out on the porch and he said to her, oh, that's where the boy gets those eyes from. My eyes are kind of webbed in between. And she tells me, she's like, he said, you have my eyes. And I thought you've been married to this man for 30 years and he didn't know what your eyes looked like. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So those kind of moments that made me go, hmm. So you're wondering where my eyes came from and you finally see her. And so it was a different time back then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Okay. We didn't have to turn it off. What a kind way to say it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Eight and nine shows a week, sometimes 10. It becomes impossibly successful. Yeah. If you look at Maxine's Baby, that's my mother's name on Prime Video, it kind of lays out the whole story. It's pretty fascinating for people to see.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
A documentary about my life that Armani Ortiz and the mother of my child did because she was the only one I would trust to give that kind of access to me. They followed me for 10 years. And it tells the whole story from when I started all the way up until the studio opening.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So in my mind, all this was going to fix a lot of stuff. I didn't think it would fix a lot of things. I was worried about it staying. How long is this going to stay? And I'll never forget telling my mother she could retire. She had diabetes. She was very ill working with the kids at the center. And I was saying, you should retire.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And I hung up the phone just praying, God, please let these place to keep working so I can take care of her. I just worried every day. that it was going to end. Yeah. It's a scary feeling. All of a sudden there's money, there's income, there's more than enough. My pathology wasn't more than enough. My pathology was you got money when you ran out of money because that's how it was.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
You had to wait to the next two weeks to get your next check. So to go from having nothing and being homeless and living on the street to the first year of making money, making a hundred and something thousand dollars and getting to the end of the year and not having a dime to pay taxes because I had given it all away. And then the next year making a million in the next year, seven million.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
It was all of this learning and progress. And I had no one to teach me or walk me through or talk to me about how this works or what this means. Nobody in my family had any money.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Even in Atlanta. Right. And also, I didn't trust because if you told me this was going to work or to do this or to do that or invest in this, I just didn't trust it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Our traumas, the things we've been through will automatically make our antennas go up and think, why are you being so nice to me? What's wrong with you? You've got wealth. You're after something. Yeah. I used to work so hard to try and dispel that for people. Like, no, this is just about somebody being kind to you because I know what that's like for somebody to be kind to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I've given away cars and houses and paid for kids to go through college and did so much stuff for people that it got to a point where I was like, I don't want to meet them. I don't want to shake their hands. I want to just stand over here and see that they're doing well because I don't want them to have that mentality. You know, probably they're like, Like, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Imagine somebody walking up to you and your car is broken down to give you a new car. What do you want? What is this going to cost me? Rather than just understanding that there are people on the planet who are just kind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Exactly. What does that do for that person? What does this do for your spirit? You as a person? And how do you pay it forward? That's what I always say. What can I do? Nothing. Pay it forward. Yeah. Find someone that's in a shittier spot than you are.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
We went from 2000 seat theaters to arenas and couldn't meet the demand. So I thought, OK, there's a hunger for this kind of storytelling. So let me move into television. Got it. It was just a bigger arena. It was a bigger arena and I didn't have to be everywhere at once. I could be on a screen in 2000 locations.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And that's when I really began to understand this lack of representation for black people in storytelling and especially my kind of storytelling for black people, because. There were lots of shows that were directed at black people, but they weren't told from the point of view of a black person who had experienced it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So that's why I think shows and movies are still going to number one is because I'm telling it from a point of view that we really get no matter what critics say, no matter what anybody says.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I don't like metal music. Metal is not my thing. I can't relate to it, but I don't criticize it and I don't judge it because it's not for me. It's not directed to me. It's not something that I can say, I like this music. So this music's crap. No, that's just not for me. And it's the same way when I think about the work that I do. It is specific in nature and it speaks to a specific audience.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And to have a critic come along and say, well, you have zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Like, fuck your tomatoes. Yeah. When I was first starting out, I had two critics in my show at the Kodak Theater sit on the same row. I watched them make notes throughout the show, too. They reviewed the exact same show. They saw the exact same thing. I read both reviews. It's the last time I read reviews.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And one guy thought it was amazing. The other guy thought it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. So I thought, hmm, this is opinions. This is what people think. And it doesn't really matter as long as I'm clear about the intention of what I'm doing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Completely true. Also to layer that is the understanding of what it's taken for me to be able to be in this business and to have this many hits and this much success. and have to fight tooth and nail to get a budget that's anywhere near a Sandler movie. Despite all the success. Despite all of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
To this day. It's wild. With Paramount, I have these shows on BT that do huge numbers for my audience. But the budgets are far lower than any of the other shows that are on some of the other parts of comparable audiences for sure. And then it's like, oh, no, no. We have a formula for you, which is basically you are black. This is your box.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Here's where you stay, because your audience is going to do this much for us in returns. And that has been since I've been in the business. So I have found a way to navigate through that, to take what I've been given to make sure the actors and actresses are paid well. And at the same time, figure out how do I make this work and grow a business? It's been challenging. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Because I would like to have one opportunity to have an even playing field. Just one where it said, OK, here's your track record.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yes, I did. Because I was talking to my agent and said, I want to do a sitcom. And they're like, oh, well, just do one. I was like, no, no, no. I feel like I need to do 10. They're like... Tyler, nobody does 10. That's not how this works. I said, no, no, no. I want to do 10. They're like, OK. So I went to Atlanta, filmed the first 10. They were awful. OK.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And I put them in the can and nobody wanted them in Hollywood. Then the UPN and WB merged. I think they became the CW. And at the time, there were about 10 or 12 black shows on the air. Those shows all went away. So all the affiliates, this is during the world of syndication, were pissed. So they were calling around Hollywood. What do you have? What do you have?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Well, I got this guy, Tyler Perry's got 10 episodes. And they're like, Tyler, you got those 10? They want them. Like, OK. So they put them on and all these different affiliates. The ratings were higher than what was there before. Blew their minds.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah, exactly. They don't have the programming to put things in or after the primetime hours, they wouldn't have the show to put in. So when they put this show in, it got these crazy numbers and they all just went crazy. And they're like, oh, Tyler, this is so great. We got a call from this network. They want to order 10 more. Another one said, oh, we want 20. I was like, no, I want 100.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. And they told me it's not going to happen. Nobody's going to do that. I was like, well, I'm not doing it because I knew a hundred minutes indication.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So I wanted somebody to commit to a hundred episodes. And that was Turner TBS. Have you watched that doc by chance? No. Ted Turner on Max. You want to turn that back on, don't you?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Were they airing twice a week? I don't know how they were airing. All I know is I was working my ass off. It took me nine months to shoot all 100. I would shoot two or three episodes a day. Oh, my God. Oh, my Lord. But all of that was because of the situation I was in. Right. The economics demanded. How do I shoot this quickly? Because they're not giving me the money. How do you make this work?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Even now when I'm doing movies, I'll shoot a movie in five days, seven days, 18 days. Oh, my God. Because when I'm talking to the DP, unless there are specific shots that we want at a specific time of day, I'm like, listen, with all the digital stuff that we can do today with lighting, make this beautiful and let's figure out how we do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I've worked with some amazing DPs who have found the way to do it. Jazzman's Blues, which is on Netflix, was the first movie I ever wrote 28 years ago now. It is the first time I ever fell in love with filmmaking and I just filmed it in 22.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I'm talking about Oprah. Yeah. The original Queen Bee. How is she Queen Bee? Oh, you're talking about Oprah. Okay. Got it. Oh, you thought I was talking. See, you were right to point this out. Exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
For me, it was the opposite. I wanted to be smaller. I would always slouch and didn't want to be seen. You want to be invisible.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
It was tricky, but we were determined to prove that we could work together and make it happen and the friendship wouldn't suffer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Definitely had to keep it as a priority. And there were times when it got tough.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
You guys have opposing interests all the time. Even with Oprah, yeah, it got tough. But what we realized and both understood is how important the friendship is to each of us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
How does this come your way? I got a call from Nicole Avant, who was coming off the tragedy of her mother being murdered here in L.A. Eighty something year old woman is at home in the evening and some gangbanger breaks into the house in Truesdale.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. And her father, Clarence Avon, who was known as the godfather, he and Quincy Jones were such mentors. Great doc on him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Who you're talking about? That Nicole. She's like, Tyler, I really feel like you should do this movie, the 6888. My mother and I feel like you should do it. Our mother passed. Like, I feel like my mother wants you to do this. And I thought, whoa, I've never heard this story. So she sends me this sizzle reel from Carrie Selig and Peter Guber, executive producer on the show.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And I saw the sizzle reel about 855 black women in World War II. I'm like, who knew? Yeah, yeah. What 855? Wait, 855 black women were in Europe in World War II as a part of the war effort? I thought, you're kidding me, right? She's like, no, this is real. And there are four or five surviving members. I said, where? So there were two that were really with it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
There was one woman, her name is Lena King. She died this year. She was 99. I'm like, I'm getting on a plane. I'm going to see her right now because she's 99. I want to sit and talk to her before I start this script. And I walk into her house. I don't know what to expect. She's 99. I'm thinking she's going to be a a wheelchair. What's her memory going to be like?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
This woman comes down the stairs, her lipstick done, her hair and makeup. Mr. Perry, it's a pleasure to meet you. She was still driving. She was still going out dancing with her friends. Her memory was as sharp as ever. Wow. So I sit down and I ask her, I was like, so I know you were a part of the 6888. Tell me about it. What made you go? And emotion, eyes welled up with water.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
No, because the strong men for me in my life weren't good men. So I wanted to be the opposite. And being tall and being big, I was always at the end of the line and always don't hit him back. And this is my cousin who was smaller than me and he would bully me. And his mother would say, you can't hit him back. You're too big to hit him back. Just don't hit him back. Just you're too big.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
77 years, she goes back and she tells me about a young Jewish boy named Abram, who was a very close friend.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Oh, wow. Tell that story. It's so good. She's telling me about this young man named Abram who died in war. He wanted to go and do something for the war and fight Hitler. She was so emotional because he'd only been there a few weeks. And all of that emotion came back to her in that moment. I saw it in her eyes. I was like, this is the way in to the movie. This is the story.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
She's telling me what happened and how much she loved him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I would say about 80 or 90% of what you see in the movie is factual. I had to take some liberties, but a lot of it's factual. The things she was sharing with me and her memory was sharp. Like you could look at her face and see that she could almost smell the moments and the memories that she was talking to me. Two weeks later, I had a script. I sent it to Nicole. I was like, listen here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And they're like, you're kidding me. We read it, tweaked it, worked on it and started filming.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I think that you're spot on. You're in love with her on and off camera. She's amazing. We worked on For Colored Girls in 2010, and this was our second time working together because between that time she had done so much, I wanted to find something worthy of her. This role, she's playing Charity Adams, who led these women, who was 26 years old at the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
You just got to take it. Yeah, just got to take it. And then one day I lost it and hung him on the clothesline in the backyard.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
She was 26 years old, leading 855 women. Carrie and I were rehearsing. All of these women, the spirit of them were with us through the whole thing. When I was finding different sets, I would look at the pictures and look at the historic references like this is the exact place. It was like so weird.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
But she and I were rehearsing in a dressing room and there's a knock on the door and it is the transportation guy. And he comes up, he says, I want to show you something. I got this trunk I want you to see. So we come out and I have this on video. The transportation guy was a World War II veteran.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
buff and he would go to these auctions and buy all these world war ii materials so he brings his trunk and he puts it at our feet it is charity adams trunk no no it's not yeah with her uniform in it her tulip tree a letter in it we both got chills oh my god all these moments of these women letting us know that they were there and they wanted this that feels impossible special spiritual
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. And ran home, told my mother, I was like, I couldn't take it anymore. She said, what'd you do? So she goes and get the kid down and she's laughing all the way. But yeah, I want it to be smaller. They were kind of right to tell you to not hit back because look what happened when you did. Yeah, exactly right. But that's my thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. And for them to do it and do it well. Another challenge was the stories about the mail. Like, how do you tell a story about the mail? Thank you. If I'm you, I'm like, I don't know, man, where's the big explosion with the mail?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And Kerry was the same way. It's like, how do you tell a story about the mail? But I think that we discount what the mail meant then, because there was no email. There were no text messages. Mail was life. And you had all these soldiers fighting and they hadn't gotten mail in months because of the Battle of the Bulge and the moving around so much. So the morale was at an all time low.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And you had hangers full of 17 million pieces of mail. That needed to get to the soldiers to boost their morale and take them through the end of the war.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
It's impossible because of the vermin who had eaten through a lot of the packages. You couldn't make out the names from the rain and the weather. The World War II of it all. The World War II of it all, yeah. And this impossible sorting task where they had just thrown all this mail into these hangers. Yeah, where do you start with 17 million pieces of fucking mail?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I am the most gentle guy in the world until I'm pushed way too far. Then there's a whole nother side.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. In the movie, he says, step aside, gal. And the gas from black women in the theater was like, ooh. So, yeah, gal is offensive. It's like boy calling a black man a boy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I tell you, the thing that warms my soul the most is the understanding that it was once a Confederate Army base where there were soldiers plotting and planning on how to keep 3.9 million Negroes enslaved. And now that land being owned by me, how great is this country that that could happen? So if that could happen for me, I don't care who you are, where you come from.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
America is an incredible place to just be and dream and live and grow. And as many problems as we have as a country, we are still a great nation that when we galvanize and come together, we can do anything.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah, for sure. Nowhere else in the world. But the fact that it's tangible, does that feel special? It does. My father would build houses. He was a subcontractor and he would get paid his $800 and he would be so happy. Oh, I got my money. But I watched a guy that he sold the house, usually a white man, sell the house for $80,000. And I always wondered, why won't you do that?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
But looking at it from this point of view, I realized the burden of being the man who owns the house. I don't have any partners. I don't have shareholders. So when that $100,000 light bill is due, I've got to pay it. That $180 plus million in payroll for all the actors and everybody, I've got to pay that every year. So I understand the blessing of it. I also understand the burden of it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And I also understand the exhaustion of it all. But I'm grateful for it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
The journals, yeah. And I get that. And every time I'm driving through the gates, I am reminded of how profound and wonderful this moment is, especially because there's so many people who wanted to do it. I can't tell you the last person who developed a studio of this magnitude. You think about Disney and Warner Brothers. So to do it at this time and at this level has really, really been profound.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
But every time I drive in the gates, this is God's honest truth. When I'm tired, when I'm exhausted, when I'm just like, OK, how much longer can you carry this? I'm reminded of that. All the people who wanted to do it, for some reason, it fell on me to do. And also watching people come through the gates who had never had a shot in this business makes me go. You can go a little further. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Did you stand out like that? Oh, for sure. I was the tallest and the biggest and the smartest. And it was a lot. And this is in New Orleans.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Listen, at 55? Yeah. I'm going to be 70 soon. In two seconds. That's the way I look at it. Right. 55 came so quickly. I'm just like, what does the next 15 years look like while I'm still able to run up and down the stairs and enjoy my life? What does that look like? And how much of this... beautiful gift of the studio is going to be a blessing to that or a hindrance to it. Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Are you the studio owner? No, no, I'm not that guy. I respect everybody's privacy and what they're doing. I'll wait. If I get invited by the director, like Ryan invited me on the last day to set, I thought that was really great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I'm finally at a place where I've got the right team in place to run it so I can step back a lot. And as soon as I got there and was like, OK, great, we're good. Here comes AI. Yeah. It's like you might want to rethink everything you're thinking here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Oh, well, congratulations. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I've done it. There's nothing else. If six triple eight wouldn't have come along. Jazz band was like the pinnacle for me. Twenty seven years to make it. I'm like, OK, now what? So I'm there. Oh, good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. I'm not as surprised as I am thankful every time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Growing up, my mother was a woman who completely gave a lot. So it was all about giving and helping each other all the time. And because we didn't have much, but we had more than others in the neighborhood, we were always the place to come if you were in need. And my mother was really, really great at that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And your wife, I know it always goes back to your wife. Well, as it should. Your wife, I was doing People's Choice Awards and somebody was supposed to present the humanitarian award and she stepped up to do it the last minute and the teleprompter went out. Oh, sure. And she was like, I don't need a teleprompter to talk about him. I'll just wink it. And it was really great. Oh, great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I'll never forget that because she was grace under fire.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I would wake up in the morning, sometimes Saturday morning, step out of the bed and I would step on somebody on the floor like, who is this person? And my mom would be like, they needed a place to stay. Be quiet. Don't embarrass them. Oh, really? There was a lot of that for sure. And was she finding these people at church or all over? We lived in New Orleans, which was the big city.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And most of her family and the man that raised me, his family were from the small country towns outside. And when the two of them got married and moved to New Orleans, it was family members that took them in. So it was always your door had to be open for somebody else. Right. And siblings? A brother and two sisters. Older or younger?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Younger brother by 10 years and two sisters by five and six years. So do you feel included at all, or do you have little brother complex? My brother's 10 years younger than me, so we never were close. But with the sisters? With the sisters, no. There was always something that was off for me in the family. Like, I didn't feel like I belonged.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So I was never able to be extremely close to any of them. It was really, really strange.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Chantel, you told me this was light and happy. Where are we going? OK. All right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
All right. OK, Monica. OK. All right. I'm with you. Well, you told them light and happy. Light and happy. But no, no, no. I'm light and happy while talking about my trauma.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
We're going to need the weed. Yeah, to walk down the side of the house and see that crawlspace little cubby house where I would hide from the abuse. And it was painted robin egg blue. I remember the blue paint that I found somewhere in a rusted can and painted. It was such a beautiful light blue.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
I now realize that what that blue was for is that people would paint their ceilings or their porches blue so that wasps and other things wouldn't build nests because they thought it was the sky. Wow. Oh, really? Yes. Southern thing. Oh, wow. Now realizing that robin egg blue was to represent the sky. It was a pretty painful and rough time. It was hard.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah. Or keep looking to the sky. Keep looking up all around you. All right. Well, look, we can keep it light and fresh. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to go where you want to go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Let me tell you why I think it's important. The far reaching effects. I don't know about what happened with you, but for me, having my abuser be a female, I just found out at 54 was rape. To be able to associate that with rape was weird because it was a female. Right. And also the man at church.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So the far reaching effects of the trauma of sexual abuse and the sexual confusion that children walk through and tried to figure that out that I had to walk through was really, really profound. I worked so hard at trying to understand it. That was the most difficult part of my life, just trying to understand what had happened.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Why it happened to me and why I couldn't shake what they did. And as children, we'd have this ability to hold on to the pain of what it was and make it about our fault. Well, what was it in me that made that man do that or that woman do that? And growing up and coming into adulthood and trying to excise that, to get it out, to understand it was really, really challenging.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
It's powerful, but it's unfair. Let me tell you why. That's what people say. I didn't really fully understand it until I had a child. And I could see my son at the age of the traumas that I was experiencing going, look how innocent and beautiful and pure. Yeah, yeah. And this innocent and beautiful, pure child does not have the ability to make those kinds of decisions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So for me, it wasn't feeling the sense of, oh, what's happening? What's happening? Is this wrong? That's wrong. It was somebody sees me and appreciates me and is telling me I'm special. Someone was kind and their agenda was about grooming rather than it being about kindness. And I tell anyone, any man, any woman who's been sexually abused as a child, if you don't have a child,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
If you don't have relatives, if you see a kid on the playground, watch not creepily, but watch the innocence of that child and then try and judge yourself through the innocence of that child. That's unfair. It is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
That's the man judging the child. Because the man or the teenager or the young man would clearly be like, what are you doing? This is crazy. Why are you here? But if you take away the innocence and the lens of the way the child saw it, then you're robbing yourself of it. Here is the most freeing part of it for me that I found at 54. in therapy for the first time in my life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
There's something called an arousal template that I had no idea about that from the age of three to seven, I could be wrong on the ages, but the therapist will tell you this three to seven, your arousal template is set as a kid, even though you're not sexual.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So if someone comes along and interject something into your arousal template, be it culturally, be it rape and molestation, violence, violence, All of those things being put into your young child brain becomes a part of your arousal template, especially for men. And for me, being a little boy, the thing that gave me the most shame was when the molester would say, you liked it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Look, you're a wreck. That's the struggle. How can I be a heterosexual boy, know I like girls and have the same sex thought and desire? That was hard to understand. But understanding that the arousal template in your brain sets that. And has been hijacked. And also, this is the thing that blew my mind. Once it's set, it can't be taken away.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And for me, wrapping my mind and soul around all of that was very freeing. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
A lot of people say, oh, my God, you're so profound. Look how hard you work. Look how much you've done. A lot of the success that I've experienced in life was because I wasn't dealing. I was just working. I would work my way through it. And relationships wouldn't really work out because I would just work and work and work and work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And no matter how much work that I did, when the work would stop, I'd be faced with these things happen to you. What do you feel about it? Who are you? What are you? And I just got to a place in my life where it's like, I'm not going to live this way anymore. And at 55, I'm the freest and clearest version of myself that I've ever been.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
Yeah, same for you. What I didn't know, because recently I've been doing all these tests. When I went to this session, they were like, OK, let's test for you for autism, because there are certain things that you are doing that are on the spectrum. So we went through all of these tests.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
And what we found is that a child like me having to live in that kind of chaos and trauma constantly, I became hyper vigilant in everything. I trained my brain to see, to watch, to protect myself in every way, which is where I work today.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Tyler Perry
So for you to say that you were in a moment of chaos is where you thrived, it's what happened to the little boy and what he needed to be okay or to feel like he was loved. And I've run into people like that. And it's one of the saddest things that I've seen because the more I try and say, hey, this is what peace feels like. There's all of this resistance to it because it's scary.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Third Term, DOGE Exposes FEMA, Epstein Files Release, Fauci Prosecuted w/ Glenn Beck | PBD Podcast | Ep. 546
My life comes in my life in a category of a tree. Some people are leaves. They come in your life. They're there for a moment. They're there for a minute. They're just there. They're going to give you a little shade, do whatever they need to. But when the seasons change or the winds blow too hard, they can't handle it. So they're out. You can't be mad at leaf people. Leaf people are who they are.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Third Term, DOGE Exposes FEMA, Epstein Files Release, Fauci Prosecuted w/ Glenn Beck | PBD Podcast | Ep. 546
Let them be leaf people. Don't be mad at them because they're a leaf. Then there are people who are branches who are a little bit stronger. You can rely on them to be there through seasons. But if you step out on them too far, they may break and leave you high and dry. So you don't know how much you can trust the branch until they've grown with you for a while.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Third Term, DOGE Exposes FEMA, Epstein Files Release, Fauci Prosecuted w/ Glenn Beck | PBD Podcast | Ep. 546
But then there are roots at the bottom of the tree. And if you find people who are like the roots, they're not trying to be seen. They don't need anybody to know they're there. They're just trying to give you what you need to hold you up. And a tree can have way many more leaves and branches than it have roots. So if you have a few roots in your life, you've done really well.
PBD Podcast
Trump's Third Term, DOGE Exposes FEMA, Epstein Files Release, Fauci Prosecuted w/ Glenn Beck | PBD Podcast | Ep. 546
And I've been very, very fortunate. God has blessed me with a good handful of roots to hold me up, to hold me accountable, to keep my feet to the fire and to pray for me.