Before Tyler Perry retires Madea, the character that made him famous nearly 20 years ago, he’s doing some reflecting.
The actor/writer/producer/director, who previously announced he would lay her to rest after “Madea Family Funeral” (out March 1) recalled how the character, based on his mom and aunts, became an accidental success.
Perry, who spoke to Variety earlier this week following a Los Angeles performance of “Madea’s Farewell Play Tour,” pointed out that Madea was only supposed to be onstage for a couple minutes during his play “I Can Do Bad All By Myself.” But he had to punt when an actress who was scheduled to appear never showed.
He said he even tried to apologize to the audience but they didn’t care about the last-minute absence. “They were chanting: ‘We don’t care! We don’t care! We want Madea!’ To look at it from there to here, I really fell into it. This was meant to be.”
But before Madea became an “overnight success,” Perry struggled to find a place in showbiz.
“Hollywood wanted nothing to do with me,” he said, describing the struggles he faced trying to break into the industry.
Perry said he staged his first play, “I Know I’ve Been Changed” for seven years before it hit big in 1998.
As he gained popularity, he began touring. In 2001, his play “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” brought him to Los Angeles, where he took meetings about a film adaptation.
“And every time they said, ‘Nope, we don’t want this,’” he said. “This is the one that got me: a white man at one of the big studios sat behind his desk and said to me, ‘Black people who go to church don’t go to movies, so this will never work.’ That was a moment for me. Because I’m seeing thousands of people all over the country come out for these shows.”
Perry wound up raising the $5.5 million budget for “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” on his own. The film premiered in Feb. 2005 to $20 million in receipts and Perry has been pumping out more film favorites since.
The success of the Madea movies allowed him to establish Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta in 2006, putting him in a position of power to “hire more people of color, hire more women, and open the door to diversity.”
Even today,“ People who are not getting their due need to be in the positions of power, from women to people of color,” he said.
“While people were fighting for a seat at the table here and Oscars So White was happening, I never got into it, even though everyone asked me to comment,” he added. “Because I was in Atlanta building my studio, I was building my own table. It’s so important to me that we understand that is how things change.”
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