Get Out may have turned out to be one of the most talked about movies of 2017, but not even its stars were always sure that was possible.
"I walked out of the room and I said to my fiancee, this is unlike any script I've ever read. This could be incredibly brilliant or it could really not work," Bradley Whitford told Ryan Seacrest on the E! Red Carpet at the 2018 Oscars.
The movie, which is a horrifying tale of a young black man named Chris discovering that his white girlfriend's family is [spoiler alert!] transferring their brains into the bodies of black people, is nominated for four awards tonight, including Best Picture, Best Lead Actor for Daniel Kaluuya, and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Jordan Peele. But if we were to take Jordan Peele's jokes a little too seriously, it should also be nominated for Best Documentary.
The writer/director tweeted that Get Out is a documentary as the entire world was wondering why it was nominated in the Comedy/Musical category at the Golden Globes.
"It's a lot of things," star Lil Rel Howery said. "It's hard to really put Get Out in a genre. It has everything included in it, and that's brilliant. Jordan was writing this movie for what, eight years?"
"What Jordan did is a miracle," said Whitford. "This is a four million dollar movie, it's his first movie, genre-busting, cultural bomb that changes the way we think of each other."
The movie also served as a revelation of relatively unknown actress Betty Gabriel, who became instantly iconic as housekeeper Georgina. "Complicated" is about the simplest way to describe her, and Gabriel says one bit of costuming really made the character for her.
"It was definitely the wig," she said. "I wish I could say something more profound, but it was the wig. She really gave me a lot. But other than that, it was actually a lot of fun to play something so out there and bizarre but actually grounded in something obviously horrifying."
Both Howery and Whitford join the rest of the world in praise of Gabriel's work.
"Betty's got what I think is one of the greatest takes in cinema history where she is playing about 20 different things, and it's the definition of a piece of work, that character," Whitford said.