Keegan-Michael Key names his four favourite movies
With a background in popular stand-up and sketch comedy, Keegan-Michael Key has inevitably parlayed that experience into a successful big-screen career, although his personal preferences aren’t entirely restricted by or beholden to the genre that made him a household name.
After breaking out alongside Jordan Peele as part of their eponymous double-act, both have taken very different paths to cinematic stardom. Whereas his former partner has become one of the most respected and acclaimed filmmakers in the business, Key has remained an on-camera talent who’s worked mainly within the realms of comedy and voiceover.
However, when revealing his four favourite movies to Letterboxd, it became apparent that he was influenced by several titles that exist entirely outside of his wheelhouse. Starting with The Matrix, the actor was effusive in his praise for the game-changing sci-fi: “I’d never seen anything like it, and I think that’s the best thing about cinema,” he said. “When somebody puts their imagination out there, and you’ve not seen anything like that before. To have that ability to just kind of go, ‘What is this, and can I have some more of it please?'”
Of course, he and Peele produced and starred in the 2016 caper Keanu and saw the star of The Matrix cameo by lending his voice to the titular cat at the centre of the story, but as of yet, Key has yet to put his mind to crafting anything on film or television that evokes Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, the latter of which he deemed to be a “masterpiece”.
His fourth and final contender is more up his street, though, with Key naming Martin Brest’s classic buddy action comedy Midnight Run as “almost a perfect film”. While speaking to A.Frame, he shed even more light on why he loves the movie so much: “Midnight Run was influential to me because I didn’t know you could do comedy that way,” he revealed. “There was something so real about the storyline, and there are set pieces that kind of stop the movie to do a little fun thing, but the comedy seemed completely integrated in the movie.”
Continuing, he offered that Midnight Run “absolutely blew my mind”, and his partnership with Peele, which saw them indulge in no shortage of bickering banter of their own on screens both big and small, serves to underline the influence that it had.
He may not have been able to pay direct tribute to The Matrix by starring in a blockbuster sci-fi, outlined his adulation for Apocalypse Now by appearing in a war epic, or channelled Goodfellas by way of a hard-boiled crime thriller, but there’s still plenty of time for him to complete the set and pay homage to all four of his favourites eventually.
