Nope 's Jordan Peele: 'I believe there are aliens out there'

Warning: This story contains spoilers for Nope.

Jordan Peele is finally ready to talk about UFOs. "I believe there are aliens out there," says the director of the impeccably eerie new horror movie Nope, when pressed to comment on close encounters of a scarier kind than Spielberg's. For Peele, 43, science fiction is a genre that, in his words, "goes right to the fear in our hearts that we are somehow alone, that we might be alone in this universe."

He means it sincerely, but you can tell that Peele, a game interview, would rather talk about anything else than the plot specifics of his latest film. Even the subject of secrecy — so crucial to the rollouts of Get Out and Us — is a topic he's happier to explore than Nope's big reveals.

"All I know is that I need to start with a big risk," says Peele during EW's Around the Table, where he joined stars Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, and Brandon Perea in Los Angeles. "I need to start with something that I'm not supposed to do, something I don't know if I can do yet. And then the project that comes from that is somewhat aspirational. With Get Out, it started with this notion of 'I have to entertain, even if I have no money to do it.' And so it has to be about the journey that I'm taking the audience on. That's become what people expect from my movies, and so it's been very important to preserve that sense of mystery."

Glen Wilson/Universal Pictures

Nope is set and shot in the Agua Dulce desert canyons just north of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. It's a suggestive, almost abstract location, onto which Peele, enjoying a larger budget and scale than ever before, pours some unusually dramatic weather, several horses, distant noises, and the presence of something ghostlike.

"I do like Westerns," he admits, "although I think this film, more than anything, is about the Hollywood mythology of the Wild West — and not only the sugarcoating of the barbarism of it, but the erasure of the Black cowboy. That's all wrapped up in this movie. In a lot of ways, it's about Hollywood."

Peele lives for subtext. His movies are delivery devices to bring us there. Refreshingly, Nope centers on a pair of adult siblings, OJ (Judas and the Black Messiah Oscar-winner Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer), sudden proprietors of a horse farm after their father (a regal Keith David, triggering associations with John Carpenter's The Thing) is mysteriously felled by a nickel that drops from the sky. Haunted and grieving, the Haywoods keep up their ranch work, their eyes tilted upward. Things don't stay peaceful for long.

Universal Pictures Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer in 'Nope'

"They play together," Kaluuya, 33, says of the believable old-joke easiness he built with Palmer. "That's something that I really wanted — the only time you see a bit of play from OJ is when Emerald gets it out of him, because she's the only person that can really unlock any sort of emotion in him. OJ didn't inherit any of his father's charm, whereas Emerald didn't inherit any of her father's responsibility, but together, they could run it."

Palmer, 28, says it was a matter of projecting backward into an unseen family history. "Thinking about the spaces in between the scenes, the moments you have never seen between them, growing up," she explains, sharing a Peele directorial tactic. "Jordan was always [saying] it's not so much about the scene that's happening, but the moment that happened before, the feeling and thought that led to that. So we kind of filled that space in our minds, and then it came out in the moments we worked together. A lot of trust."

An unusually intimate sci-fi film with some of the same domestic concentration of M. Night Shyamalan's spooky 2002 Signs, Nope expands its scope to accommodate a local tech geek, Angel (comedic breakout Brandon Perea), who hooks up a pair of video cameras for the shaken Haywoods.

"With Angel, there is this want to be a part of a family," says Perea, 27. "He's dealing with his own demons and he's looking for some sort of purpose." Conspiracy-minded, bored at his day job, and a chatterbox in desperate need of an audience, Angel becomes part of what Perea calls a "mission."

Another layer of complexity — and a key to Peele's deeper comment about broken Hollywood rejects — arrives with the introduction of Ricky "Jupe" Park (Minari's Steven Yeun), a local impresario and owner of the tourist attraction Jupiter's Claim, an Old West theme park. Once a child actor on the rise with a Goonies–like career path, Jupe was the star of a fictional comedy called Kid Sheriff until a horrific on-set tragedy stalled his momentum.

Universal Pictures

"Without going into too much detail, I think sometimes it's easier for you to be the projection everybody wants you to be than it is for you to resist," Yeun, 38, says. "Especially when you're that young going into it. How many layers and masks and shells are you living behind?  I think when you're new to a structure like Hollywood, there's an inherent infantilization, and I wonder if a lot of people like that can feel that weight of the gaze upon you. And it takes years to chip that away." (Palmer, a child actor herself since her Nickelodeon days and making Barbershop 2: Back in Business at age 11, agrees: "That is so real.")

This is the metaphorical ground Peele is happiest on — also because he's no longer talking about flying saucers. Identified since Get Out as a purveyor of the "social thriller" in the vein of Night of the Living Dead's George A. Romero, Peele wants us to receive Nope as another opportunity for excavation (while also being the "best f---ing crazy adventure alien movie with Black people," he adds, smiling).

"We went deep and we went hard," he says of his work with the actors. "The word I said the most on set was spectacle. A lot of our analysis dealt with spectacle and this business of spectacle. There's a magic to it, something I've devoted my life to being a part of, and there's also something insidious about it. And when you have that duality, that's a perfect kind of thing for me to tackle because I love that. I love duality."

Nope opens July 22. Watch EW's complete roundtable in the video above.

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