‘You need to be a little bit crazy to be here’: Nope star Brandon Perea on his breakout role and close relationship with Jordan Peele

Last month, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and director of Get Out, Jordan Peele, shared a clip of the moment that he told Brandon Perea he’d booked his first major film role – in Peele’s subversive UFO horror, Nope. It’s the kind of video you can’t help but grin madly at. Peele tells the actor at a call-back audition that he liked the reading the actor had previously given, but he’d have to change the entire script to accommodate it. Perea bites his lip anticipating a gentle let-down, until Peele says, “I’m gonna change the entire script… you got the role.” The clip went viral. We watch as Perea goes through a rollercoaster of emotions from disbelief to joy before breaking down in tears.

Perea, who up until then had been known for his role in the Netflix series The OA, plays Angel Torres in the film. Angel is a disaffected tech store worker with washed-out, blond highlights and some patchy facial hair. That look, Perea tells me, in a Hollywood hotel where all the staff wear white tracksuits, was his own invention. He came up with it while playing a UFC video game during the pandemic. “I created this character,” he explains, “to look like a badass and then I was like, ‘Why can’t I do that though?’” In the film, Angel latches on to Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer’s brother-sister duo in a bid to capture alien life on film. His performance had critics reeling out buzzwords like “scene-stealing” and “breakout” for the depth and comic relief he brought to the movie.

Brandon Perea

Today, gone are his character’s washed-out blond highlights and patchy facial hair. In their place are his natural black locks, grown out now, and a baby-clean chin. He lights up the grayscale chic hotel with an energy matched only by his bright green floral cardigan. “Yoooo, that’s crazy!” He exclaims, punching the air and rocking back in his chair when I inform him we share the same exact birth date. “I’ve never met anyone like that, ever.”

It’s safe to say that, despite starting on the same day in 1995, Perea and I have lived our 27 and a half years since then very differently. Perea was born in Chicago to parents of Puerto Rican and Filipino heritage and lived there until a flourishing career as a breakdancing roller skater took him around the country in his mid-teens. I think I probably owned a pair of Heelys by then. “I grew up breakdancing because of my dad,” Perea explains, “back in the day, my dad was popping and locking in the alleyways of Boston.” His dad now works as a technician, something Perea is both proud and relieved about, having watched him work night shifts as a hospital security guard growing up. “He’s Angel Torres in Nope,” Perea jokes.

When Perea combined his breakdancing skills with a newfound roller-skating hobby inspired by a girl he was trying to impress, other skaters began travelling to Chicago to challenge him to “dance battles”. Search his name on YouTube and you can still find clips of a young Perea backflipping into battle against men twice his age in the rink. “I was battling everybody that came to the roller rink,” he says. If it didn’t already sound like Perea was living in some kind of Step Up universe, he later joined the Freeze-Force Jam Skate Crew and it was through this troupe of roller dancers that he was able to go on tour, performing live shows and earning decent money for a 15-year-old kid. “I think that’s what kind of crafted my mindset to be in this industry,” he says. “Because you need to be a little bit crazy to be here and have to dream big.”

When he was 16, Perea’s skating coach took him aside for a frank conversation about his ambitions in life, apparently stressing that he couldn’t breakdance forever. It was then that he made his decision to move to Los Angeles with the goal of pursuing a career as an actor. His parents told him: “Go ahead, you’re never home anyway. But stop buying sneakers and go pay rent.” A few years later, he would get his first taste of success playing high school overachiever Alfonso “French” Sosa on Netflix’s cerebral 2016 drama The OA. The ambitious project has since become a reference point when people talk about series that were “cancelled too early”. Netflix unceremoniously canned the show after a mind-bending second season, despite positive reviews and decent audience figures, enraging fans. “I was surprised… but also not,” Perea says of its premature demise; “there was a lull” in communications from the production. It was a harsh lesson in the fickleness of Hollywood and how to be a jobbing actor. “I was spending like I had a season three lined up,” Perea says, “and then it didn’t happen. That taught me you can’t rest on having something.”

What came next tests the strength of many actors’ convictions – the hinterland between jobs and the relentless rejection that comes with auditioning for role after role. He got agonisingly close to some major jobs; he recalls going through “rounds and rounds” of auditions for HBO’s viral teen drama Euphoria only to fall at the last. “Yeah, that one put me in a hole for a second,” he admits. No wonder his reaction to being cast in Nope was so visceral.

What becomes evident as we talk is that Peele is a huge fan of the young man in front of me. “While we’re filming, too, he kept beefing up the role,” Perea said. “I’d come to set prepared with the lines I had and he’s like, ‘Hey, I added two more pages for you.’” The actor reveals his character was even supposed to die in the original script, but Peele wrote that out as well. It’s clear too that the director enjoyed teasing his young protégé. After landing the role from his audition based purely on a short description of the character, Peele sent Perea homework movies – Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey and No Country for Old Men – but there was still no script. “I remember thinking, ‘What the hell is he making?’” Perea recalls. When he finally received the script on Christmas Day 2020, there was no cast list, just the characters. The director eventually texted him in “code”: “DK, Palmer, Yeun.” Was it intimidating going from no castmates to three incredibly famous ones? “I just told myself: ‘You’ve been prepping for this your whole life. You’ve gotten yourself to a level of performance where you feel confident acting across from anyone. Time to prove it.’”

I get the feeling it’s not the last time Peele will give Perea the call-up; I point out that the director is clearly not averse to working with repeat actors given his relationship with Kaluuya. Perea’s eyes light up. He tells me: “[Peele] constantly says, ‘Daniel’s my [Robert] DeNiro if I’m Martin Scorsese’.” Who does that make you? I ask. “I’m motherf***ing Leonardo DiCaprio.”

‘Nope’ is available to stream on Peacock in the US and is available to rent on Amazon Prime in the UK