Daniel Kaluuya is getting candid about his difficulties in the film industry.

In a conversation with “Nope” director Jordan Peele for Essence, the actor reveals that before landing the lead role in “Get Out”, he was on the verge of quitting acting altogether.

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“I’ve never told you this, but when you reached out to me and we had that Skype, I was really disillusioned with acting,” Kaluuya admitted to Peele. “I had stopped acting for like a year and a half. I checked out, because I was just like, this isn’t working. I wasn’t getting roles, because racism and all this kind of stuff — so you reaching out was like, ‘OK, I’m not crazy. It’s proper. It’s going to be alright.'”

“It seems like after that project, you came with a real intention about how you wanted to shape your career,” Peele said.
Daniel responded, “I did. I was just like, If it’s not a ‘f**k yeah,’ it’s a no. That kind of cleaned house. A ‘ F**k yeah’ to me is when you’re doing plays, you’re doing it for 400 pound a week. That’s pre-agent, pre-tax, pre-everything. So I was like, ‘Would I do this for 400 pound a week?’ And if the answer was yes, then all right, cool, I’ll do it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtZIlCzfYY8

After starring in “Get Out”, Kaluuya’s career began to take off, landing roles in films like “Widows” and “Queen & Slim”, and getting an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work in “Judas and the Black Messiah”.

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The actor says that now, with more roles to choose from, he’s on the lookout for deeper characters to get him excited.
“I want to go into places that I don’t know I can. I want three-dimensional characters. I want to tell the story, no matter how big or how small,” Kaluuya says. “In ‘Widows,’ I’m not in the film that much, but my character had an arc—he had a story and an evolution. As long as that’s there, then I can engage with it.”