Tyler Perry
speaker
187 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Tyler Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
For me, most of that carnage was driven by dudes. My mother was the balance for everything for me, and she wouldn't let me see things one way. She worked at a Jewish community center for most of my childhood, she would educate me about what Jewish people went through. My mother just would not let me see things one way. So I wouldn't lean toward one group or one sex of a group.
I always base people on, are you a good person? And I have a really good sense of people, which came from that childhood of being hypervigilant. When I walk in, I'm like, hmm.
Are you like... I'm not skeptical. I'm immediate on what I feel. I don't talk myself out of what I feel.
Yeah. And also the understanding of what we had to survive and how our brains taught us. It's like a deer drinking water. They're always looking up. They can't just drink the water and relax. I drove into my property the other day and there was one laying down. I had never seen a deer lay down. And the deer was laying there and looked at me as I just rode by on my bike and never got up.
And I thought, what a great place to get to in life where you can just lay down in a green pasture and just be okay.
I don't know if I always have, but what I know I do is work myself to exhaustion. So the sleep is good. But I also do know how to stop and check in, see if I'm OK, go away, get quiet. I like to be alone. I'm a loner by nature. I could spend days and weeks and months in the mountains by myself.
I got put out of high school and had to go to PM high school to get my diploma. It was a high school that was at night after school for adults and people who got kicked out of school. Right, dudes who were smoking cigarettes in the parking lot.
Yeah. I was looking through some things recently and I ran across one of my old journals. From that era? Early 2000s. And I opened it up and I started reading and I just sat there. I was reading for hours. I called Oprah. I was like, listen, go pull out your journals and read some of the stuff you were going through 20, 30 years ago. It was so spiritual. I was in tears.
It's like you had written your own Bible of the things that you had come through. And to go back and look at them and see how far you've come was so beautiful to me. So I would tell anybody, journal, write, and then go back years later and see.
Yeah, I was just like, oh, I hope the show works. I don't know how I'm going to pay this light bills $3,000. I go back and look at those things and go on. look at where you were. I'd come through being homeless. So I was writing it from the point of view of where I was and not where I was going. Understanding where you're going is so much more important.
I've learned to build for where I'm going rather than where I am. And looking back on all of that stuff and reading all of those moments and those memories, it really was powerful for me.
OK, so you started at what age do you think? 18 or 19. I was watching the show and I started journaling and I didn't use my name because at that time we wouldn't talk about the things that you and I just talked about. Right, right. I would use these different characters and a friend of mine found them and goes, man, this is a really good play. And I thought, hmm, maybe it is a play.
What I write about is this character went through this. I was talking about adult survivors of child abuse and rape and molestation. So I moved to Atlanta. Prior to that, did you ever fancy being a writer?
I definitely wanted to be an architect. The man that raised me was a builder and I wanted to build houses. But when I wrote this, I always loved entertainment, but I never thought you can audition. You're trying to be invisible, not center stage. Yeah. So having my friend encourage me and doing that first play and seeing people, the 1,200 that I thought would show up and only 30 did. Yeah.
Having the 30 people's reaction to the show speak to me in my soul, I was like, whoa. So that sparked something for me.
Hurricane Katrina literally blew the roof off the poverty that was in New Orleans. Mardi Gras was amazing. And the tourists are on Bourbon Street and St. Charles Avenue. And it's beautiful and it's amazing. But two blocks behind those mansions is where we were in the ghetto with drive-by shootings and police brutality and murders. And it was just insane.
So some friends of mine invited me to Freaknik, which is the Black Spring Break. Black kids went to Atlanta. White kids went to the beach for Spring Break. I don't know what that's about, but... I got there and while everybody's partying and dancing and drinking and I'm realizing that I see black people doing well. I'm from Detroit.
And I think I'm probably six years older than you. Five. Yeah. So you get it. And being a black person and never seeing a black person be successful unless it was a pimp or a preacher to come to Atlanta and see their doctors, their lawyers, they're in suits. A full middle class. I'm home. So I loaded up my Hyundai and move right to Atlanta. You put up a play.
And as you say, only thirty five folks.
I'm going to give you $12 a ticket.
Showing 61–80 of 187 · page 4 of 10
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