Cord Jefferson writes to keep from raging. After getting his start in journalism writing about identity and relationships for publications like The New York Times Magazine and editing hot takes at Gawker, he began channeling his ire about race and other social delusions into film and TV work. Since then, he’s helped craft one zeitgeist-capturing show after another—The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, Master of None, The Good Place, Watchmen, and Station Eleven—examining the complicated societal factors shaping our culture and exploring his own emotional responses along the way. When he won a Primetime Emmy for Watchmen in 2020, he thanked his therapist. “Therapy should be free in this country,” he quipped.
Now, as he navigates an industry still immobilized by actor and writer strikes, Jefferson makes his directorial debut with the film American Fiction, out December 15, about an English professor (played by Jeffrey Wright) who writes a satirical novel under a pseudonym to expose the racism and hypocrisies of the publishing industry. The film, which recently won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a bit meta, he admits. “Making this movie, I feel like I found the thing that I should have been doing my whole life,” Jefferson says. “At 41, I finally found my footing.” Here, he explains how.
Before you got started in TV, you wrote a great piece on Medium about being a Black journalist and covering what you described as “the racism beat.” What was that like, and how did it inform your career change? The main reason I made the transition [to Hollywood] was that someone gave me an opportunity to. A man named Mike O’Malley was putting together a writers room for a show called Survivor’s Remorse. He reached out to ask if I would come write on the show. It was kind of a gift. I just said yes.
But the piece that you’re talking about, “The Racism Beat”—I felt like I’d become a go-to person for takes about race. I remember a white police chief in Maine had been recorded calling Barack Obama a [N-word]. So, somebody asked me to write an essay about it. I remember thinking about it, and wondering what they expected me to write, and what I could say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times before. I understood then that was not what I wanted to be doing with my life, that I have more to offer beyond writing about the worst—and often the least interesting—things that happen to Black people.
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