Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Handout
Ten years ago, Cord Jefferson was blogging for Gawker. Now, his directorial debut, American Fiction, is almost guaranteed a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars and he’s a frontrunner for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Jefferson traces his path from online journalist to full-fledged filmmaker, with stops along the way writing for Master of None, The Good Place, and HBO’s Watchmen, for which he won an Emmy Award in 2020. He talks about nailing the darkly satirical tone of his new movie that interrogates the expectations of Black artists, how his own experience in Hollywood influenced the script, and the “emotional breaking point” he hit before getting to where he is today.
“I still miss journalism,” Jefferson says when I ask him about making the rare move from writing about culture to becoming part of it. “The grass may always be greener, because there’s a lot of headaches over here, I will tell you that.”