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Welcome back to The Daily Show. My guest tonight is a Grammy award-winning rapper whose latest album is called Michael. Please welcome Killer Mike. Hi, Mike. Sir. Congrats First on sweeping all of the major rap categories at the Grammys. Now, I'm sure you can't talk about what else happened there.

No, but I did sweep them like a new broom in your grandma's living room.

That's what it's there for. Grandma has it out to sweep up all those Grammys.

Shouts out to Betty, man. Rest in peace to my girl.

Well, I have to ask the big question, though. Yeah. The big question everybody had after the Grammys. Did Taylor snub, Céline.

Shouts out to Taylor, man. She, God damn. She wanted the Grammys. Her boyfriend wanted the cheese. If she's in the poly, me and my wife need a third. We're trying to win the gig.

Is that what Power If that gives you right now? You feel like you could throw off polygamy right now?

I feel I could pull it off. The only problem is my wife's good with a gun. She doesn't agree. But I'll keep trying for all the men out there. Okay, that's good.

Yeah, I was going to say, you seem like whatever you throw out there is going to come back to you. I'll give it a You might as well ask, right? I mean, you are on quite the streak. I mean, as well as winning the Grammys, your son, after a three-year search for a kidney, just got a kidney.

My pony boy got his kidney. My pony boy got a kidney.

I I had to talk with him about his kidney like you do a puppy.

He's like, This is your kidney. You're going to take care of it. Marijuana? Alcohol? No. But his nurses, we were sitting there as the nurses was telling us, and I was like, God damn, this is a lot for a 21-year-old kid to be taken on. But my kid's a warrior, man. I just got to tell him he's my healer. That's what I'm doing.

Frankly, it is legitimately wonderful to hear Good news happening to a good person.Thank you so much.What genie lamp did you rub? What do you owe your success to?

I owe it to the fact that I was just too stubborn to give up. My manager, Will, from active management, Will Bronson, and my ANR, because we're all friends, but we have it just saying, just get up every day, put one foot in front of the other. I have a lot of talent, but it took me 20 years to get here, and I was just too stubborn to quit. I think that that's half the battle, just being tenacious about it. I want to take time to Honestly, thank my children because my children have lost so much time with their dad as I was doing it. We've had great quality time, but the quantity of time has been cut short. Malik, Anaya, Ponyboy, Mikey, just thank you guys so much for allowing I had to do this. I love it.

You've been at this for a long time, and you famously said, Don't give up. Don't give up.

You're never too old. You're never too old.

I'm 45.

Well, could I Can I win a best rap album? Could that happen? As long as you got a hairline, then you do. And there we go. That's half of it. It's creeping. It looks great, though. You're on it. Maybe we're too old for porn, but rap, we got. We're set for rap.

There was never an age where it would have been an appropriate choice in my life.

At 18 years old, listening to Luke and the Two Live crew, we could throw that dick.

That was the era. I want to talk a little bit about your album, a personal album, but I want to also look at... You reference Satan a lot on this album. Even on the cover right here, you have devil horns. Horns and halo. Horns and halo, right? Spirituality is a big part of this album. We're in an interesting time right now. People seem to be moving away from spirituality, and yet it feels like you infuse a lot of your work into it. I know you have a lot of respect for the craft of hip hop, of rap. Do you feel like that can serve as a conduit for people who are looking for spirituality, who are looking for something? What do you see that role?

I came out with a rap album called Rap Music 12 Years ago, and it was titled Rebellious African at Me, Be Me, and then People's Music, For All the People. At that time, I realized that the only religious experiences I really had were when I listened to or was a part of music. Music is a very big part of the church. I'm a Southern black man. I grew up in Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Music was a conduit to put everybody in the room on the same frequency and the same energy. I actually believe that people aren't away from spirituality as much as they're running from the institutions that promise them spirituality and just deliver things like, Give us money, or we need tithing. I think that people are trying to find I think that they're trying to find God and spirituality, but they're finding it in places you wouldn't regularly find it. They're finding communing with one another. They're finding it away from church and out in nature. Not that nature becomes their God as much as it gets a lot easier to talk to God when you're standing under a tree smoking a joint.

He's closer that way, right? I won't talk about my thing, but I was sitting in a jail cell, and I didn't have anything to do. So I just prayed, and I just thank God for three hours. I said, Just thank you for the blessings I have been bestowed upon me. Thank you for the Life You've Given Me, I invoked the spirit of my mother and my grandmother and was like, I hope you guys see me. Not the jail part, but the winning part. After I got out the next morning, I got a call with my son, I got a kidney. I'm very much a more believer. I have a white manager. Will is a white guy, and he said, Shit, for 15 years, I thought you were an atheist. I was like, no, Will, I was more agnostic. But making this album brought me closer to God. It brought me closer to the grand being that has designed human beings to be here. I'm thankful that music brings me closer to my creator.

Well said. It's interesting you talk about it like that because I do think I spend a lot of time out in the world. I go to a lot of rallies, talk to a lot of people, and it's very easy to otherize the Maga crew, the Trump crew, whatever side you're in. I think we're on a search for something that makes us feel whole, makes us feel part of a community, and gives us a sense of meaning. I think without that in our lives, we replace it with the quickest, easiest, loudest thing. Finding a conduit for potential good, I think, is remarkable and to be commended. So kudos on that. Yes, thank you. Tell me this. I'm also a big fan of Run the Jewels. Yes. I love Run the Jewels.

Listen, man, we It felt like Run the Jewels got snubbed a few years ago. One of the best parts about being one half of, to me, the greatest rap group going today is the fact that this album, Michael, also brought LP, his first Grammy. Yes. Shots out and congratulations to my partner, Rhyme LP.

Give it up to LP. I'm curious. Actually, what is fun is a fan of yours and a fan of LP's, you hear your influences and what you do on solo projects and what you bring to a Run the Jewels project. I think when you are marinating on Michael Rund the Jewels and sitting down thinking about what is a Run the Jewels project and what is a Killer Mike project, how do you delineate the two?

Well, it's all the same. Not that it's the same sound, the same thing. But so imagine Run the Jewels, the Uncanny X-Men. Then if you read, if you're a reader, I'm about the I'm going to nerd out on you guys.

If you can work polygamy into this, I'm going to be so impressed.

Well, man. Who wouldn't want to marry Storm? Okay, there we go. Rund the Jewels is the Uncanny X-Men. There's a lot of characters come in and out, rest in peace, the Gangsta Boos, Zack De La Roca, Mavis Staples, Josh Homi, all these people have come in. What we have there is a university where you can find anybody. Michael is just a prequel story to one half of the group Run the Jewels. Michael is an extension of the Run the Jewels world, and you You get to see the reason why I rapped about my mother and Run the Jewels. You get to hear the whole story on Michael. Imagine Logan to Wolverine, and that's what this is. So this is an extension of Run the Jewels.

That's right. Here's the sound. We're going to switch gears a little bit. I will say I rewatched it recently after the George Floyd murder. You made an impromptu press conference in Atlanta. You were asked to make a press conference. I was. Which I think is, if you haven't seen it, I think is not only the clarity of it, the catharsis within it, and the call to action, I think is a pretty remarkable moment over the last decade. Thank you. Something you said there resonated with so many people. You asked people at a time of unrest, you said to focus on, to plot, plan, strategize, optimize, organize, mobilize. We're on that process right now. Yes. I know you were talking specifically about police brutality. Here we are three and a half years later. Where are we on that? How are you seeing that process unfold?

Well, I'll tell you this. What I was saying that night, because there's a lot of misconstruing it, and just, I'm going to be honest, people be lying. They did. Some people have agendas. Trust me, I know. Some people are like, You were defending the cops and crying. I'm like, No, it's not what I was doing. I was actually smoking blunts with Noriega eating fish sandwich just trying not to go.

Noriega the rapper. Yeah, Noriega the rapper.

Okay. Shots out to Noriega. My friend Tia said, Hey, the mayor called me. There's some unrest. I was like, She never called me. He was like an hour after asking for about an hour. He said, Well, if you're not going to go, I'm not going to go. Everybody knows the rap rules. You can't leave your homies down. I went with them. I'm pulling up to the jail with a quarter pound of marijuana, a little stone. A quarter pound? I had just scored. How long does that last? About a couple of weeks, maybe. I I'm there and I'm just like, okay. I see our mayor who's also from me and TI neighborhood, and she's doing a dynamic job of telling the police, Hold off, don't make a move. We're going to talk to the public first. Then Tip gets up to speak and I'm just like, okay, I stood in solidarity with my homie. Then he's like, and now kill her Mike. I'm like, oh, shit. I just simply told the truth. The truth is, what happened to George Floyd was a murder. It was evil. It was wrong. The truth is also that Atlanta has long been a fortress for the black civil rights movement in this country and civil rights, period.

If we would have burned Atlanta down, we'd have burned down a fortress that people could use to plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize. So ultimately, all I was saying in that speech was, use your homes, use your businesses, use your churches as centers to welcome people in and plan, plot out what are we going to do next. Strategize, organize, and mobilize, and then do the next thing. I challenged them, and my city stepped up. What I'm seeing in Atlanta now is organizers be supported. I'm seeing more organizers come out. My man Rowet down there just gave them an amazing He's in speech yesterday. Shouts out to him. He's an Indian-American guy. He's in Atlanta. He's organizing constantly. We're organizing around the vote. I saw Atlanta's really welcome other people in to try to push back against the powers that be. That's what my city has always done. That's what we're doing now, and that's what I think we'll do going forward. Organizers do not have to agree with each other. We do not have to agree with methodology, but we must start to agree with it that there's a problem to be solved. If we waste too much time infighting, the problems never get solved.

The oligarchs and corporations continue to run this country.

Killer Mike, everyone. Welcome back to The Daily Show. My guest tonight is a director, an Emmy-winning writer whose film, American Fiction, is currently nominated for five Academy Awards. Please welcome Cor Jefferson.

Thank you.

Wow. Feature, film, debut, and you get five Academy Award nominations. I'm curious how you're feeling about it and how you're wielding that strength now.

I'm not wielding it too much, unfortunately. It probably should be more demanding, yeah, but I'm not. I feel a little overwhelmed. We made this movie with very little money and very little time. We didn't make it under these great auspices, and so to be here right now, sitting with you is beyond my wildest dream.

This must be your highlight right now. Yeah, man. This is crazy.

You know what? Truly, I I don't really get nervous in interviews anymore, but I'm pretty nervous here right now. The Daily... Yeah, man.

The Daily show's a big deal. You have nothing to be nervous about, all right? All right, so I want to talk Palestine.

Okay, that's great. Everybody, get out your phones. There you go. Start putting this on the internet. I'm happy to do it. My publisher is going to love this.

They're like, Let's get into this. Well, I mean, this movie, it causes a ton of conversations. It feels very of the now. When I watched this, I think what I was surprised to find out that it's based on a book from 20 years ago. But it's still so relevant today. What did you see in that story that made you want to tell this story now?

Oh, my God, man. Three months before I found this novel, Erasure by Percival Everett, that I adapted, I sent in a script to some executives and they sent me back a note that a character, and had a black character, needed to be blacker. I said, I will indulge this note if whoever gave it is willing to sit down with me and tell me what it means to be blacker. Tell me how to make somebody blacker. Of course, that no went away because they probably knew they were setting themselves up for a huge civil rights lawsuit, and so they dropped it. But that was just one of the many instances in my TV and film writing career where it's people just have this very limited perspective of what it means to be a black writer. They have a very limited perspective of what black stories look like, what black life looks like. When I read this book, that was published in 2001, but it felt like it was written yesterday, I was so overcome with this idea that it felt like it was written specifically for me. I just understood the characters so well.

I think one of the targets of this film is white liberal audiences. First off, how dare you? Do you get exhausted talking to white liberals about this movie and having to explain race to them over and over again? To be like, What is the deal with race in America?

No, actually. I mean, maybe a little bit, but I've set myself up for this. This is the work that I put into the world, so I'm happy to chat about it.

I think what's interesting about this movie, too, is that it's not only a satire, it's a political satire, but it's also really heartfelt. I was surprised by that. It really follows a family. It follows the struggles that they have. Why was that important for you to tell and to marry with it? It seems like those don't always go together when you see satirical films. Yeah.

I wanted the movie to be satirical but never farcical. The clip that you played right there, I think, is one of the grounding moments of the film. I didn't want it to feel like it was so funny or got so silly that it became slapsticky. I always wanted it to feel... Because I feel like when satire gets slapsticky, it lets people off the hook. It says this entire thing is a joke that you can laugh at. You don't need to take it seriously. I think that this movie makes some people uncomfortable sometimes, and I'm okay with that. I think that every time I'm experiencing a piece of art and it makes me uncomfortable, I lean in because I think that wisdom is on the other side of that discomfort.

Well, I want to talk a little bit about the ending. I don't want to give it away, but this movie ends and there's a meta-ending, and I wonder if that comes out of network notes, wanting you to end this movie for a certain audience. If that comes out with you either not knowing how you wanted to end it or wanting to end it in a way that leaves people with their own ways in which they can end the story. How did you approach wrapping this thing up?

The novel that I adapted is very meta-textual. The The epilog of the novel is this Latin phrase that translates to, I offer no hypothesis. To me, that meant that it was-Great Hollywood ending. Just a Latin phrase they used with mathematics. People love that.

Got you, baby. I love that ending and the ending to seven, my two favorite endings.

Huge Hollywood ending. I didn't want the ending to be didactic. I wanted the ending to feel audacious. I was trying to figure out what the ending was going to be, and one of the producers called me and said, The movie's a big swing. Try to write an ending that feels like a big swing, too, because I was stuck as to what the ending would be. I wrote an ending that feels as audacious as the rest of the movie. Yeah, I think that I didn't want to spoon feed people lessons. It said, I offer no hypothesis. I'm giving you some scenarios and some characters. It offers you an opportunity to think for yourself and decide how you want to think about things.

I do think this movie also asks a lot of questions about what Hollywood wants in movies from black filmmakers and what a white audience will respond to. You make this film. Then a primarily white Oscar public is like, We love this film. I wonder how you... Is that a sweet revenge? Is that an extension of the meta story That's the story that you're telling? It feels like there's a conversation about people enjoying your film that's already happening within your film.

Yeah. I'm basically slowly cosplaying as Jeffrey Wright. I'm looking at myself right now and I'm becoming Jeffrey Wright in the movie.

Do you normally wear these glasses? Those are Jeffrey Wright glasses.

This is a Jeffrey Wright suit. I'm going gray like Jeffrey Wright. It's getting more and more many. I'll tell you how meta it's gotten. The other day, Percival Everett, the author of the novel Erasure, was stopped in a coffee in LA. This is a true story. Somebody asked him if he was Jeffrey Wright. He said, No, I'm not Jeffrey Wright, but I wrote the book that Jeffrey Wright is now in the movie based on. I like to maybe think that maybe this will all Maybe after the Oscars, I'll reveal that I'm a white guy, and nobody will know. You guys don't know. I tell you what. Maybe I've been in blackface this whole time, and it's just a big trip.

God damn, I love it. That would supersede the ending for me. I would appreciate if you did that.

I'm just Tobey Maguire.

People don't know that.

I'm Tobey Maguire.

You were Tobey Maguire this whole time. The whole time. Core Jefferson is not real. American fiction is now played in theaters everywhere. Cora Jefferson.

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