I wanted so desperately to be on Parks and Rec because it was the cool, hipster show. He’s not a particularly religious person, but… “Thank God I didn’t get some of those pilots. But if I got on SNL, my career wouldn’t have happened.” I got friends who made it on SNL and, at the time, I was like, damn. “I dodged so many bullets,” says Glover now. For example, he auditioned to be on Saturday Night Live in 20, and was turned down. He hit me one day and he was like, ‘I hated you for years!’ ”Īs sweet as the opportunities Glover had after Atlanta were, he is almost more appreciative of the doors that closed leading up to the show than the ones that opened. “I didn’t know it was between me and him until later. “The last two people who were fighting for the job were me and Kenya Barris.” He laughs. “There is no animosity between us or anything like that, but said it herself…. (In the show, this manifested in the form of the character Toofer, played by Keith Powell.) He jokes about it being a two-for-one, because you could get someone from Harvard and a Black voice in the room for basically no money at all. He got me nominated…twice!”īut it’s safe to assume Donald Glover’s impostor syndrome was complicated by the fact that he was hired because of a diversity initiative at NBC, in which adding a Black writer to your writers room didn’t count against your budget. “The things he wrote for me made me very funny. “When I first read his writing during 30 Rock, I was like, ‘He’s got it,’ ” Tracy Morgan tells me. “I used to have stress dreams every night where I was doing cartwheels on the top of a New York skyscraper with the other writers watching me.”īut Glover had the goods, even at that young age, and the show’s stars took notice. “It definitely didn’t feel like I was supposed to be there,” he says. Gilga is a perfect filter for that shit.”ĭonald Glover was still an RA in Goddard-a dorm at NYU-when he got his first writing job on 30 Rock in 2006. People don’t get quality anymore and they need a filter. It’s the processes I was a part of that made me happy. I made a lot of money, and it wasn’t that I was depressed or anything like that, but I realized it’s the people I was around that mattered.

Like, that’s really what I realized this last go-around.

They do things based on if it’s gonna make them happy. “I guess corruption for Gilga would be when we stop moving like a rich kid.”

George barris photographer