Jordan Peele wrote and directed the year’s most-surprising, best-reviewed movie

One of the smartest and funniest people in show business — best known as half of the comedy team Key & Peele — biracial actor Jordan Peele says he had “never seen a protagonist that looked and felt and thought like me in movies.” So he created one: Peele wrote and directed 2017’s best-reviewed movie, the $4.5 million horror-comedy “Get Out,” an uncomfortable look at race relations in America, which has grossed more than $250 million worldwide.

Peele acknowledges that the stunning success of “Get Out” probably had something to do with the fact that, just a month earlier, Donald Trump had been sworn in as America’s 45th president. “The point of the movie was to get people talking about these things,” he says. Now, imagine, if you will, what we’ll be talking about next year, when Peele reimagines the iconic “Twilight Zone” sci-fi anthology show for CBS’s All-Access streaming platform.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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