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.
