UB Preview: ‘They Cloned Tyrone’ | Friday on Netflix

“They Cloned Tyrone,” premieres on Netflix this Friday.

A series of eerie events thrusts an unlikely trio onto the trail of a nefarious government conspiracy in this pulpy mystery caper.

Cast includes; David Alan Grier, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Tamberla Perry, Eric Robinson Jr. with Kiefer Sutherland.

Welcome to the Glen. It’s like a lot of places. People go about their business, eating at the fast-food chicken place, getting their hair done, dancing at the club, attending church services. Sure, it’s a little rundown and has its share of unsavory types — pimps, hustlers, sex workers — but the rhythms of life are recognizable.

But if you look a little closer, just below the surface, literally and figuratively, something doesn’t seem quite right. Where is it exactly? And… what year is it? That building that used to be a tire shop and before that a diner is just an empty boarded-up shack now. The cars are old but also, new?

And now maybe those recognizable daily rhythms are a little too predictable. Maybe the people on the fringes of the community, who are just trying to grind out their daily hustle and keep their heads just above water in a neighborhood that hasn’t felt safe for a while — in part thanks to their activities — deserve a closer look. Maybe there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to a system that isn’t set up for people born into poverty and struggle to succeed beyond their means. Are they doomed to repeat a cycle? Or… is someone dooming them?

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Fontaine (John Boyega) is a hustler in the Glen. He is a stoic individual with a gold grill we barely ever see since he rarely smiles. He often responds to situations by drawing a gun. He continues to mourn the loss of his younger brother Ronnie and lives with his mom, adhering to the same routine each day.

Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) is a pimp in the Glen. He was the International Players Ball winner back in 1995 and expects his girls to treat him with some respect, even if his best pimpin’ days are behind him. He is highly verbose and has a flair for the dramatic.

Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) is a pro in the Glen. She works for Slick Charles and knows Fontaine from around the way. She may be a working girl right now, but she has dreams of getting out. She thinks fast on her feet and, like her childhood hero Nancy Drew, loves to solve a mystery.

When Juel Taylor called on Erykah Badu to reimagine her classic 1997 hit “Tyrone” for “They Cloned Tyrone,” the four-time Grammy winner was up for the challenge.

She went into her home studio to re-record the song — a global rallying cry for women dealing with trifling men and their no-account friends— endeavoring to replicate the track exactly but also tinkering with it to give it a few subtle and clever twists.

“I only changed a few things around, but I had to sing the whole song and sing the whole song
exactly how I sang it when I was 27,” Erykah states; “I had to make my voice sound just like that so that people wouldn’t detect. You really have to listen to hear the words that are changed before it gets to the hook where it’s a little bit more obvious.”

The singer/songwriter is pleased with the outcome and excited to be part of the vision. “I love it,” she says of the richly-layered tale. “It’s a well-done, well-written script and very well executed cinematography-wise Just the whole storyline. I love to be a part of really
creative projects.”

Director Juel Taylor and cast Jamie Foxx, John Boyega and Teyonah Parris speak on the film!

Juel Taylor tells us, the Genesis of “They Cloned Tyrone!”

It came from two places. First, I’ve always wanted to do something in the mystery space. I love mystery movies and genre blends, and I wanted to do something with detectives who weren’t really the most suited to detecting. I had this joke in my mind for a while, like “a pimp, a pro, and a hustler walk into a bar and they end up solving a mystery.“ I had this juxtaposition of characters that I wanted, but I didn’t necessarily have anything more than a tone, a vibe.

My writing partner Tony and I would kick around ideas. Second, I had some personal inspiration thinking about some of the people I grew up with and our different life trajectories. It got me to thinking about the systemic roots of struggle and the role of privilege and how different circumstances can lead to different outcomes. But what if those outcomes were rigged with a Manchurian Candidate-style twist?

Me and Tony always say, “The gas cloud slowly becomes a planet,” meaning we had all these ideas, and slowly the gravity of it just started to crystallize it into a planet. And so now we had questions that we wanted to explore with our unlikely detective set up and once we started to talk about it thematically, we started working backwards from the Manchurian Candidate aspect of the idea, the conspiratorial element of it just naturally kind of outgrew from that, because instantly we started thinking about the government. We had a lot of fun: What if every conspiracy was true?

There’s also a sense of temporal dislocation as it’s not clear what era the film is taking place in since it has both touches that feel like the ‘70s and then moments that feel like the future. Tony and I love world building. And so if we’re making this bizarre version of where I grew up, I already knew it was going to be lost in time. because there are so many neighborhoods, everywhere really, where there’s just a lot of reminders of a time when more people were invested in the community. It’s not a period piece, but when you go certain places it feels like you’re in a different period, so I wanted the Glen to just be out of space and time. This could be in any city, in any year. And obviously we put a couple of clues in there. You see an iPhone but you also see old flip phones and tube TVs, and the decor is dated, and all of that is by design to kind of create a level of temporal dissonance.

There were two directives, above ground and below ground. The above ground directive was like, “This place hasn’t had a coat of paint since the ‘80s.” I showed our production designer Franco references from where I’m from. “Hey, this is a place that I grew up eating at that closed down, but they never tore it down and they never put a new business here and the paint is chipping off. So you can kind of tell what it used to be. If you live here long enough you know exactly what it used to be.” It was very straightforward above ground in terms of “this place is lost in time.” You put lost in the ‘80s in the ChatGPT and you get the Glen.

The movie asks the question, is this lack of investment organic or by design? There’s a level of unseen curation, in this particular neighborhood that sometimes you wonder, is it really curated like that in the real neighborhoods? For the underground, the directive was, “Imagine this place was built as a secret Cold War bunker and there’s all these whispers of how people tried to make ships disappear and they tried to research invisibility and all of these conspiracies about governmental experimentation.” We imagined that it evolved in its own hermetically-sealed bubble. So there’s this tactility to the technology, where on the one hand it looks like stuff we can’t do today, but on the other, it looks like it came out of a World’s Fair in the ‘60s.

John Boyega Speaks on On Loving the Script…
“It was a breath of fresh air, and at the same time something so unique and nuanced. Coming from the world of Attack the Block, I could sniff that something was coming. I knew we were going to start with a very basic world where we know how it runs and the crazy is just going to get amped up more and more. I was thoroughly impressed, just glued to every page, curious about the mystery of it all and the way Juel and Tony built up the conspiracy. Definitely a unique piece of writing.”

On How the Trio Developed their Chemistry…
“Jamie’s the one that was literally leading the charge in terms of making sure our chemistry all made sense. It all started from when we first met each other, making sure that we were breaking bread with each other, getting to know each other as individuals before venturing into the script and the journey of it. He invited us to his place out there in ATL, myself and Teyonah and the rest of the crew. And we just literally built up natural chemistry. Everybody gets along with Jamie, so it’s easy to build a nice relationship with him. And he’s just got great insight and amazing stories. Teyonah’s great. She’s laid back and willing to do anything for the part in terms of just exploring different ways of emoting
expression within scenes. She’s funny and charismatic.”

On The Themes of The Film…
“One of the things I love about the film is what you’re met with is a silhouette of a hustler, a silhouette of a pro, and a silhouette of the stereotype of the pimp. But then you find out that the pimp had dreams that were more nuanced than what he’s living now. You find out that the pro is well-educated and she compares herself to Nancy Drew in terms of the way her mind operates. And you find out that the hustler is dealing with trauma, after the loss of his younger brother. You see beyond the stereotype, now you get the layers of the onion skin coming off. Now you’re seeing that, okay, cool, these are human beings, with somewhat stereotypical positions, but it’s deeper than that. I’m so curious to see what people are going to feel about it.”

Jamie Foxx Speaks On the Script…
“Juel and Tony created something we have never seen before. It has such a freshness to it, and the way it combines all different genres felt so unique and it was such sharp comedy, I loved it.”

On Slick Charles…
“Slick isn’t so slick anymore, but you can see how at one time he was on top of the world — ‘The International Players Ball champion of 1995!’ But he’s getting tired of the game and facing an existential crisis. He can’t help getting caught up in the action once he finds out about the conspiracy.”

On Working with John and Teyonah…
“I hadn’t worked with either of them, but I had been watching both of them come up and they are both fantastic. John is cool and a hard worker, and I was impressed by his commitment to making each character distinct. And Teyonah is just a bundle of energy and whip-smart. Getting into a rhythm with her where we were bantering back and forth was easy.”

On The Film Not being Set In A Fixed Time…
“It gave us the opportunity to explore different tones and really focus on character, like who are these people in this place that time seems to have forgotten. And a lot of neighborhoods are like that, stuck in a moment that doesn’t feel quite like now.”

On Working with A First Time Director…
“It never felt like that. The man is not a novice, he knew exactly what he wanted in terms of shots, in terms of what he wanted to say, how to get great performances, command a crowd of extras, devise this crazy world and say something while he was at it. Juel Taylor definitely has a bright future and stories to tell.”

Teyonah Parris Speaks on Her Initial Reaction to the Story…
“It was a page-turner for me, and I knew that I wanted to be a part of it in someway. I love that the film uses satire and pulls from so many different genres to speak on the state of our community.”

On Building Yo-Yo…
“Typically, she is a woman who, in her profession, would be marginalized and her function, like all of the characters in the film, is to represent an archetype and a stereotype. So, it was important to Juel and me to make sure that we did see her heart and her smarts and where this woman came from and that she was a fully-fledged person who has aspirations and hopes and dreams, but who society and this government sees as interchangeable stereotypes. I love that we are humanizing this community.”

On Working with John and Jamie…
“John did amazing work with his character and really cracked open something very vulnerable with what Fontaine is experiencing. I loved working with him. And Jamie is an iconic legend and just the epitome of class and fun and professional. I learned so much just watching him and then to be able to actually work with him? He is amazing. Everybody knows that, but he’s so generous. The relationship between Yo Yo and Slick, they go back and forth with each other, they’re able to cut each other and then smooth it over with love because they really love each other, but they’re still going to cut deep. And obviously, Jamie is a master at improv and he would help me with comebacks for Yo-Yo.”

On Working with Juel Taylor…
“From the beginning I knew he had a very pointed vision, and when we met and he would talk about it, I would get lost in just the way he was describing it to me, what his ideas were and what he was hoping to do with the film. And so from the jump, I never really looked at him or felt, ‘Oh, he’s a first-time director.’ He had such a clear idea of what he wanted and he had an excellent team to help bring that to life.”

On What She Hopes People Take Away from the Film…
“I hope that people leave talking about just how real these people are and this story is. While it seems very large and farcical at times, it’s also very deep and touches on some real and sensitive issues. I hope that this film allows people to have those very hard conversations about the larger system.”

Directed by Juel Taylor and written by Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor.

Producers for the film, Charles D. King, Stephen “Dr.” Love, Tony Rettenmaier, Juel Taylor, Jamie Foxx, Datari Turner.

UB Preview: “They Cloned Tyrone!”