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Donald Glover Talks ‘Atlanta: Robbin’ Season,’ Chevy Chase & More to The New Yorker

blame it on Meka February 27, 2018

With one of 2018’s most anticipated television shows, Atlanta Robbin’ Season, set to debut in a matter of days (March 1st), Donald Glover sat down with The New Yorker for a rather eye-opening interview (spoiler alert: it’s confirmed that he’s currently working on the Deadpool animate series for FX).

In the piece written by Tad Friend, Donald revealed that he essentially had to lie to FX (or, in his words, “Trojan horse”) to convince them to green light Atlanta.

“I knew what FX wanted from me,” Glover said. “They were thinking it’d be me and Craig Robinson” — the Hot Tub Time Machine actor — “horse-tailing around, and it’ll be kind of like Community, and it’ll be on for a long time. I was Trojan-horsing FX. If I told them what I really wanted to do, it wouldn’t have gotten made.” Stephen Glover, Glover’s thirty-year-old brother and his closest collaborator on the show, said, “Donald promised, ‘Earn and Al work together to make it in the rough music industry. Al got famous for shooting someone and now he’s trying to deal with fame, and I’ll have a new song for him every week. Darius will be the funny one, and the gang’s going to be all together.’ That was the Trojan horse.”

Donald also showed a knack for thinking up legitimately good ideas on the fly:

As the crew reset, Glover said, “You know what I always wanted to do for an episode?” Just then, that week’s director, Amy Seimetz, called, “O.K., action!” The actors ran the scene again. On “Cut!,” Glover continued his thought: “Yeah, so it’s the exact same thing, only with a bunch of white people who kind of look like us. And in the middle of the episode you realize it’s called ‘Boston.’ ”

He didn’t mince words on his former Community co-star, Chevy Chase, either.

Chevy Chase, one of Glover’s co-stars, often tried to disrupt his scenes and made racial cracks between takes. (“People think you’re funnier because you’re Black.”) [Dan] Harmon said, “Chevy was the first to realize how immensely gifted Donald was, and the way he expressed his jealousy was to try to throw Donald off. I remember apologizing to Donald after a particularly rough night of Chevy’s non-P.C. verbiage, and Donald said, ‘I don’t even worry about it.’ ” Glover told me, “I just saw Chevy as fighting time — a true artist has to be O.K. with his reign being over. I can’t help him if he’s thrashing in the water. But I know there’s a human in there somewhere — he’s almost too human.” (Chase said, “I am saddened to hear that Donald perceived me in that light.”) Glover quit in the fifth season [of Community], too bored to do it anymore.

The entire article can be read here.