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
What is going on? Yeah. But I was a kid asking my mother all of my life. Remember asking, is he my father? Her answer would always be the same. I hate to tell you this, baby, but he's your father. I asked her on her deathbed, is he my father? Same answer. I hate to tell you this, but he's your father. It's 15 years ago this week that I'm dealing with this.
So I'm a little emotional as I'm thinking about it. When she died, it didn't sit well with me. So I did a DNA test with my brother and I. DNA test comes back, we don't have the same father. So I'm like, OK, well, one of us isn't dads. Yeah, but I knew he was his. He is his spitting image, everything, his attitude, his voice. So then I do another test with the man himself and I'm not his child.
And if I could wake my mother up for five minutes, I'd be like, hey, can you just tell me? Because what I want her to know is. Is that I wouldn't judge her. She was 24 years old. This man was beating the shit out of her. She was in misery. And if there was a man that loved her, hooray for her. That makes me smile and happy to know that somebody loved her because of the way he was treating her.
Yeah. Any moment of comfort you would want for her. Yeah. But on the other hand, my mother was deathly afraid to be in the house by herself. There's a story of her being home alone with my two sisters. I wasn't born yet. And she was screaming and banging on the wall. It's a double house for the neighbors to come over and help because somebody was trying to break in the house.
That's all I know about the story. I don't feel that I'm the product of a rape, but because I have all of these looming questions that are out there, I wish she had just told me if she knew.
That's right. My mother was an extremely kind, giving and loving woman, but she's also very, very private. So I want to give her the dignity of what she believed. But I knew it from childhood. Isn't that weird? Yeah. And it wasn't because of physical resemblance. No, it was just, I could not understand how this man could look at me with such hate. So you believe he knew as well? Yeah.
And then there were clues. I think I was probably in my late teens, early twenties. They were sitting out on the porch and he said to her, oh, that's where the boy gets those eyes from. My eyes are kind of webbed in between. And she tells me, she's like, he said, you have my eyes. And I thought you've been married to this man for 30 years and he didn't know what your eyes looked like. Yeah.
So those kind of moments that made me go, hmm. So you're wondering where my eyes came from and you finally see her. And so it was a different time back then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Have you cooled off?
Okay. We didn't have to turn it off. What a kind way to say it.
Eight and nine shows a week, sometimes 10. It becomes impossibly successful. Yeah. If you look at Maxine's Baby, that's my mother's name on Prime Video, it kind of lays out the whole story. It's pretty fascinating for people to see.
A documentary about my life that Armani Ortiz and the mother of my child did because she was the only one I would trust to give that kind of access to me. They followed me for 10 years. And it tells the whole story from when I started all the way up until the studio opening.
So in my mind, all this was going to fix a lot of stuff. I didn't think it would fix a lot of things. I was worried about it staying. How long is this going to stay? And I'll never forget telling my mother she could retire. She had diabetes. She was very ill working with the kids at the center. And I was saying, you should retire.
And I hung up the phone just praying, God, please let these place to keep working so I can take care of her. I just worried every day. that it was going to end. Yeah. It's a scary feeling. All of a sudden there's money, there's income, there's more than enough. My pathology wasn't more than enough. My pathology was you got money when you ran out of money because that's how it was.
You had to wait to the next two weeks to get your next check. So to go from having nothing and being homeless and living on the street to the first year of making money, making a hundred and something thousand dollars and getting to the end of the year and not having a dime to pay taxes because I had given it all away. And then the next year making a million in the next year, seven million.
It was all of this learning and progress. And I had no one to teach me or walk me through or talk to me about how this works or what this means. Nobody in my family had any money.
Even in Atlanta. Right. And also, I didn't trust because if you told me this was going to work or to do this or to do that or invest in this, I just didn't trust it.
Our traumas, the things we've been through will automatically make our antennas go up and think, why are you being so nice to me? What's wrong with you? You've got wealth. You're after something. Yeah. I used to work so hard to try and dispel that for people. Like, no, this is just about somebody being kind to you because I know what that's like for somebody to be kind to me.
I've given away cars and houses and paid for kids to go through college and did so much stuff for people that it got to a point where I was like, I don't want to meet them. I don't want to shake their hands. I want to just stand over here and see that they're doing well because I don't want them to have that mentality. You know, probably they're like, Like, yeah.
Imagine somebody walking up to you and your car is broken down to give you a new car. What do you want? What is this going to cost me? Rather than just understanding that there are people on the planet who are just kind.
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