After the one-two sucker punch of Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele is back to terrify us with UFO thriller NOPE. He tells us why he keeps flipping horror on its head

WORDS ELLEN E JONES

For almost a year, that one-word title — Nope — was all we knew about Jordan Peele’s new one. Yet that was enough. Because with just two movies behind him, a new Jordan Peele outing is already an event. That’s been the case since his 2017 debut, the instant classic Get Out — about a Black guy’s (Daniel Kaluuya) terrifying encounter with his white girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) family — grossed $255 million on a $4.5 million budget, and got white liberal America reflecting on the reality of racism. And with the 2019 release of his Lupita Nyong ’ostarring doppelgänger dread-fest Us, Peele became a bona fide horror auteur.

In Nope, Kaluuya and Keke Palmer co-star as siblings running a California ranch, supplying horses to movie sets. One day, they spot a UFO and determine to capture it on camera.

With a bigger scale than Get Out and Us, and more ambitious filmmaking, it may well take Peele’s reputation for super-smart genre cinema to the next level.

If the ‘auteur’ tag sounds overblown, consider what else Peele, via his Monkeypaw Productions company, has ushered into existence: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, HBO series Lovecraft Country, plus reboots of Candyman and The Twilight Zone. And as a filmmaker, he operates on multiple, seemingly contradictory levels simultaneously. He can make a fun, Saturday-night movie that’s also a ferociously astute social satire. Or, as with Nope, a potential summer blockbuster that looks like it might be his most intense, inward-looking film yet.

Talking to Empire in a Western-style shirt, Peele looks impeccably turned out and is unmistakably himself: he is friendly and fun, but occasionally betrays a hint of nervous anticipation.

Ever the pop-culture nerd, he knows his work will live on through 1,000 in-depth YouTube analyses and gloriously convoluted fan theories. Nope may have a title that rings with finality, but the conversation has only just begun.