Lil Rel Howery was on The Tonight Show this week promoting his stand up tour. You may know him from Get Out and Bird Box. He was hilarious with Fallon and made me laugh out loud a few times. I honestly didn’t expect Rel to be like his characters but he was funnier. I was drinking water when he was describing his trip to Hawaii and I had to spit it back into the cup.

On if he understood how big Bird Box would get
I knew it was good. I hope my next character know karate or something. I want to have a sword, something. I keep doing regular person stuff. In get out all I did was pick up my friend with the car. I was basically an Uber driver.

He didn’t realize he had a stunt double and did the stunt himself
I did a stunt. I wasn’t supposed to. There was a dude dressed just like me. I don’t know why I didn’t put two and two together. Maybe I felt like [the stunt double] was trying to take my job. I end up doing my big scene. I fully ran and tackled that dude myself and I hurt my elbow and everything. I wasn’t supposed to do that. Nobody said nothing. They didn’t say stop or maybe you shouldn’t do this. I thought I was Tom Cruise for like 10 minutes.

He took a trip by himself to Hawaii
Black and white people [are] different on vacation. White people are really nosy ‘So, you’re by yourself?’
‘I mean you can hang out with us’ and they start telling me all they business.
The black families they’ll just whisper to me. ‘We know who you is. We ain’t trying to blow up your spot. We see this family adopted you. But if you need some help… just do your glasses like this.’ That’s a true story.

After that Rel said that his birthday coincided with the red carpet premiere in New York of Bird Box and that Sandra Bullock was so nice and told everyone about it and got him cupcakes. I’ve heard this before from people who work with her. They say she’s super considerate and makes nice gestures like this. He also did a John Malkovich impression (that’s at about 3 minutes into the second video below) and it was so good. Apparently Malkovich and his partner, Nicoletta Peyran, helped him understand his Bird Box character’s motivation for a scene where he explains his book and by extension the whole point of the movie. If you haven’t seen Bird Box yet give it a chance. It’s not the most amazing movie but it’s a solid horror film and you won’t be mad for wasting your time. (My standards are low.) I’m going to look up Rel’s standup now!

Here is his interview in two parts. He also did a bit with Jimmy (that’s here) where he played a TSA agent, like in his Get Out role, dealing with the shutdown. That was decent but not too funny, I don’t think he wrote it.

He was friends with Kevin Barnett, who passed away suddenly at just 32.

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