A biography for Keegan-Michael Keyhasn’t been written yet.
“The immediacy of improvisation is intoxicating, but there's an intimacy that you get that's very different when you're doing drama.”
“I'm a great consumer of kung-fu movies - mid-'70s to late-'80s.”
“It was very important thousands of years ago to categorize things. I can eat that plant, I can't eat that plant. Or this tribe, not that tribe. We don't have to do that anymore - we have processed food now!”
“Success isn't measured by the amount of people that watch you unless you allow it to be.”
“I'm trying every day, when I meet a new human being, to not have the first thought that comes into my mind be, 'Are they going to like me?' I'm allowed to say, 'I like this, and I don't like that.'”
“If you look at any successful skit comedy show, ever, there is that format of introducing you to the player in the beginning, and then going on to see those sketches.”
“I love dialects and accents; they're something that really resonate with me and that I find fascinating.”
“There's a very famous South African playwright named Athol Fugard, and I'd be in any play he's ever did.”
“I'm a firm believer in the idea that there are a limited amount of human stories that we tell - there's about seven of them - and of course, there's variations on those stories, and they can take place in infinite places.”
“I'm tall and thin but not strong, so you're either an athlete or you're funny.”
“There's something very simple and contemplative about 'John Wick' - what is interesting is that it looks like it was based on an Akira Kurosawa movie.”
“I'm looking for human stories to do.”
“I would like to invest more of my brain space in understanding the history of my city, because whenever I learn about the history of Detroit, it's always so fascinating, from a little kind of beaver-trading post to the place where automobiles were manufactured.”
“We live in a gray world, and I want to tell gray stories.”
“I'm very, very, very interested in martial arts.”
“You can not have comedy unless people are behaving badly. You can't have it.”
“I'm adopted, so I didn't know my father, but apparently he was pretty tall.”
“A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.”
“For me, as a child, I certainly thought that there were more black people in the world than white people.”
“I'm from the Midwest, so I always assumed, 'Well, I have to think badly of myself, because that's being humble.'”