Donald Glover interviewed himself for Interview Magazine, and they got along fine.
The interview caught some online blowback — something Glover predicted when he tweeted on Friday, “looking forward to yall being mad @ me next week.”
But the Atlanta creator and star seems to have had fun. Among the highlights: He compared his album Because the Internet to Radiohead’s OK Computer and coined the term “emotional diabetes.”
Here are seven of the wildest parts of his interview with himself.
The part about God
“Culture is just us telling stories to each other we all remember from being god,” Glover wrote.
If you’re confused, so was the interviewer part of Glover’s psyche, because the follow-up question was, “You mean like stories we’ve all forgotten as god? I’m confused.”
Glover then clarified: “I think culture is just us telling each other the truth. Being present together. I bring up god because I think there’s no ‘we.’ And that’s how I make things now. I think of the moment I wanna give someone. But I make sure that someone is me, not ‘us.'”
He asked himself if he’s “afraid of Black women”
As a person who says he dislikes being interviewed, Glover sure didn’t spare himself any hard-hitting questions. One of them was, “Are you afraid of Black women?” to which Glover answered, “Why are you asking me that?” After clarifying that he feels like his relationship to Black women has played “a big part” in his narrative, he then accuses himself of “using Black women to question my Blackness.”
Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Glover said that Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge was supposed to be on his upcoming Amazon show Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but that she left due to “classic creative differences.” The truly bizarre part is when he asks himself whether or not they’re still friends, to which he replies, “What does it mean to be a friend?”
Apparently, there are no hard feelings: “I still like her. I assume she still likes me.”
He added that Waller-Bridge has been replaced by PEN15‘s Maya Erskine.
His son’s dream
The rapper, writer, actor, and farmer is also a father of three. The most poetic thing Glover has heard lately, according to himself, is something his son said — and honestly, if I had a son, I’d still be thinking about it, too.
“I was putting my son to bed a few nights ago and asked him what he was thinking about. He said, ‘I’m thinking of the last long dream I’ll ever have,'” Glover wrote.
What was the dream about? I’m dying to know. Glover called the exchange “haunting” and “beautiful.”
Also Read: Did Michelle Carter Really Put on a Suicide Prevention Fundraiser in Honor of Conrad Roy III?
Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, China, and ADOS
Again refusing to spare himself any uncomfortable question — and indeed creating some, perhaps unnecessarily — Glover managed to cram such figures and institutions as Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, the entire country of China, and the American Descendents of Slavery into a single sentence, asking himself for his thoughts on all four topics.
He then used a self-described “dodge” to simply reply, “You are who you are.”
“Emotional Diabetes”
Speaking about criticism, Glover lamented that society is beginning to develop “emotional diabetes.”
“There’s money and clout in loving and hating you. You have to sift through and try and see if someone is debating in good faith. The internet doesn’t provide a large-enough amount of that. You know what? I’ll tie in my Joe Rogan and Chappelle answer now, too. A lot of people believe both of them are doing what they do in good faith. It’s not cynical. It’s not CNN or Fox. It doesn’t feel to most people like they’re trying to sell something,” he wrote. “People are looking for other people to interact with in good faith. Because a lot of this rage is artificial. People have emotional diabetes and don’t even know it.”
Comparing Himself to Radiohead
Speaking about his Childish Gambino album Because the Internet, Glover compared it to one of Radiohead’s most revered albums, referring to it as “the rap OK Computer.”
He knows how that sounds.
“It’s prescient in tone and subject matter and it’s extremely influential. And I know no one’s gonna give me that until I’m dead,” he said in the interview. “But it’s true.”
Atlanta Season 3 is now airing on FX.
Main Image: Donald Glover in Atlanta Season 3. Photo Credit: FX
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