How A Touch Of Jealousy Led To Tyler Perry's Unexpected Star Trek Casting
If you watched J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of the "Star Trek" motion picture franchise — and considering that the film made almost $400 million, earned rave reviews, won an Academy Award for Best Makeup, and helped spawn a "Star Trek" renaissance that persists to this day through multiple acclaimed TV shows, there's a decent chance you did — then you probably weren't surprised to discover the film had surprises. Maybe you knew that original series star Leonard Nimoy came back, but maybe you didn't know that the planet Vulcan would be destroyed, or that Scotty accidentally killed Captain Archer's dog. Either way, the references, revelations, and cameos were practically inevitable, so much so that many "Trek" fans probably didn't raise an eyebrow at some of them.
But there was one moment in Abrams' first "Star Trek" movie that was genuinely unexpected, thanks to a cameo that had no relationship whatsoever to the franchise's past, from an actor/writer/director who hadn't really even been in anyone else's movies before.
Tyler Perry, the playwright who successfully parlayed his comedy character Madea (an elderly woman with anger issues and no filter, played by Perry himself) into a hit franchise, appeared in the 2009 sci-fi blockbuster as a brand new character, Admiral Richard Barnett, the head of Starfleet Academy. In his first scene, Barnett nearly throws a young James T. Kirk out of Starfleet. In his second and final scene, he makes Kirk a captain.
And why did Perry appear in "Star Trek?" Was he a lifelong fan of the series, like so many guest stars before him? Or perhaps he was friends with J.J. Abrams, since they work in the same industry?
Nope, Perry had never seen the show and the two filmmakers don't seem to have ever met.
Instead, it's because Abrams was jealous.
Where no Madea has gone before
"Tyler's someone who I've admired for years," J.J. Abrams admitted in an interview with Female. "I mean, not just in his abilities as a writer, director, and actor, but as an industry. I mean, this guy is amazing. And quite frankly, I've been jealous of him for a long time, because the work that he's done has been incredible. And we have people in common. And I just used those connections to reach to him and send him an e-mail just to say, 'Hey, it's JJ Abrams. Would you be interested in playing a role in this movie? And he was intrigued."
Tyler Perry may have been intrigued, but one might say he wasn't entirely prepared. Apparently, he didn't know "Star Trek" at all. But Abrams said he "kind of pushed a little bit," and after reading the script Perry took the part.
Ironically, the thing that made Abrams so jealous of Perry — his self-made career and burgeoning artistic empire — was also what made Perry's cameo so very unusual, even for an actor who had already starred in and/or directed seven movies. "He'd never been on anybody else's set before," Abrams said. "He's never acted in anybody else's movie."
It's an unusual statistic. Certainly worthy of note. Then again if you want to get pedantic, the first Madea movie, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," was directed by somebody else. Specifically, Darren Grant ("Killing Hasselhoff"). However, the issue of a film's true authorship has been debated in the film industry since practically its inception, and since Perry not only starred in "Diary" in three separate roles as well as wrote the screenplay and co-produced, Abrams' point is still well-taken.
"The way that he's created his business, his industry, his studio, and done his work, TV and film, is unbelievable to me," Abrams said. "And I just — again, I'm just a fan."