Donald Glover interviews himself: 'Are you afraid of Black women?'


Donald Glover's next guest needs no introduction: It's ... Donald Glover.
For Interview magazine, Glover had an in-depth discussion with Donald Glover. Yes, the Atlanta creator conducted an interview with himself, which he described as an attempt to "get questions I usually don't get asked."
Among the questions Glover posed to himself were, "Are you afraid of Black women?" The actor and rapper asked himself this because "I feel like your relationship to them has played a big part in your narrative," but he told himself, "I feel like you're using Black women to question my Blackness," adding, "I hate talking about race more than five minutes unless it's with other Black people and/or we're laughing."
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Glover also asked himself if he's "worried about getting canceled," responding that this is "the game" and that "you can get torn apart for anything, true or not."
Other topics in the conversation included his Mr. and Mrs. Smith show, what the word "culture" means, "bad takes," Euphoria, and Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. He also suggests his 2013 album Because the Internet has "proven itself to be a classic" because it was "prescient in tone and subject matter and it's extremely influential."
The Glover-on-Glover interview received some mixed reactions, with critic Angelica Jade Bastién calling it a "great example of how the skills of profilers/critics/interviewers are so undervalued," while critic Robert Daniels suggested Glover "makes it very difficult to like what Donald Glover makes because Donald Glover is so annoying."
In the piece, Glover asked whether the concept of interviewing himself — which he already did once before in 2011 — is "contrived." His response to himself? "I don't think it's more contrived than any other interview." Was Childish Gambino not available to conduct the interview?
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Brendan worked as a culture writer at The Week from 2018 to 2023, covering the entertainment industry, including film reviews, television recaps, awards season, the box office, major movie franchises and Hollywood gossip. He has written about film and television for outlets including Bloody Disgusting, Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Heavy and The Celebrity Cafe.
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