Donald Glover sat behind the wheel of the Nissan Sentra, his door ajar, and lit a joint. In the scene he’d just finished, for the show “Atlanta,” he’d jammed on the brakes to avoid a wild boar in the road, an apparition that made him wonder just how high he was. On this crisp October morning, the car was parked beside Gun Club Road in northwest Atlanta, a woodsy region where a few shacks and a cemetery were all that gestured toward urban life. “This isn’t real,” Glover said—his joint was a prop, filled with clover and marshmallow leaves. “But it actually makes me feel kind of high. Smoking in the car like high school.” He passed the joint to his co-star Zazie Beetz, who inhaled companionably as Glover nodded along to the rhythm of the door-alarm beeps.
Glover is the thirty-four-year-old creator, head writer, occasional director, and star of “Atlanta,” the black comedy about black life—three men and a woman going nowhere much, and beginning to realize it—that in its first season won two Golden Globes, two Emmys, and nearly universal admiration. Chris Rock told me, “ ‘Atlanta’ is the best show on TV, period.” In this episode, from the second season (which débuts this Thursday, on FX), Glover and Beetz’s characters, Earnest (Earn) Marks and Vanessa (Van) Keifer, are driving north from Atlanta in Van’s old Sentra to a German festival called Fastnacht. Van, who speaks German for reasons we never learn, is excited; Earn, who inclines toward watchful truculence, is not. Earn and Van have a daughter and they sleep together off and on, but they are not precisely a couple. “At FX, they didn’t get Earn and Van at all,” Glover told me. “I said, ‘This is every one of my aunts—you have a kid with a guy, he’s around, you’re still attracted to him.’ Poor people can’t afford to go to therapy.”
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As they waited for the next scene, Beetz turned the conversation to marriage; she and her boyfriend had been talking about engagement rings. Glover said, “Yeah, I’m not the marrying kind.” (He and his partner, Michelle, had a nineteen-month-old son, Legend, and she was eight months pregnant with their second son.) He took a hit, then went on, “I’m O.K. with some rituals. If you grew up knowing there was a bear in your future, because your dad kept telling you, ‘When you’re thirteen, you’re going to have to kill a bear,’ then, when you turned thirteen, you would kill the bear.” Beetz was baffled. “The bear,” she repeated. The door was still beeping, the way a jarring sound grows in a scene until you realize it’s an alarm clock and it was all a dream.
“Atlanta” has the hallucinatory quality of déjà rêvé; no other show would conjure up, then banish, a black rapper named Justin Bieber. The series, shot almost entirely on location, shifts its setting and focus every episode, mapping the city in the fanciful manner of a medieval cartographer. Hiro Murai, who directs most of the episodes, said, “Atlanta is Wild West-y—every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There’s no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down it could engulf you.” As the crew had set up for the boar scene, a nearly toothless man driving a beat-up Honda stacked with Twinkies and Valvoline made a U-turn to try to get in front of the cameras. At a barricade cordoning off the shoot, he called out, “Yo, shrimps, here comes Johnny!”
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Glover grew up just outside Atlanta, and he makes the city look both vast and confiningly tiny, as it might to an onlooker playing with a telescope. In the pilot episode, Earn, a rootless Princeton dropout who’s been doing odd jobs, goes to his cousin Alfred Miles’s house with a proposition—and is greeted with a gun in his face. Alfred, a rapper known as Paper Boi, who pays his bills by dealing drugs, is beginning to be a local success, and in a crabs-in-a-barrel city everyone wants to pull him back into the barrel. Alfred’s roommate, Darius, a slinky conspiracy theorist, lowers his knife when he sees that Earn poses no threat and offers him a cookie.
Glover’s dialogue exhibits a saltatory quality that also defines his career. As a boy, he wanted to be a wedding planner. Instead, he has been a sketch comic; a standup comedian; a writer on “30 Rock”; an actor on “Community”; a d.j. named mc DJ; a musician known as Childish Gambino, who was nominated for five Grammys this year; and a budding movie star, who will appear as both Lando Calrissian in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” out in May, and Simba in a live-action version of “The Lion King.” “He can push the envelope in all these different areas,” Ryan Coogler, a friend of Glover’s, who wrote and directed “Black Panther,” said. “And it’s not that difficult for him.”
Slim but thick-chested and broad-shouldered, Glover has the rolling, slew-footed walk of a riverboat captain. In a group, he laughs as often as he makes others laugh, a trait rare among the occupationally funny. Acquaintances love to proclaim how warm or chill or dope he is, but none of that is exactly right, or exactly right for long. He answers the phone warily, as if it were always 3 a.m., as if he were on guard against his own immense likableness. He is attracted to people who don’t seem to want his approval, but, increasingly, everyone does.
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