Tyler Perry Talks Meet the Browns and Star Trek

It seems that every time we hit the entertainment circles on the internet, Tyler Perry's name pops up all over the place. Perry's obviously one of the busiest filmmakers in the business. Since 2002 when he directed the popular Madea's Family Reunion and the critically acclaimed Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Tyler Perry has amassed 14 directorial credits in both film in TV. Now Perry's latest project, Meet the Browns, hits theaters on March 21 and The Deadbolt caught up to the multi-talented director/producer/actor at the film's recent press junket where Perry talked about everything from casting Angela Bassett and former L.A. Laker Rick Fox to the popularity of his Medea character and his upcoming role in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek.

Tyler Perry on the Meet the Browns character, Brenda:

"I just wanted to write a character a lot of people can relate to. There’s a lot of women in that situation and it doesn’t make them bad people, it doesn’t make them any less human than anybody else. It was very important to me that this woman be very relatable and I think a lot of people will be able to connect with that. These three kids; she may have been in love with every father, who knows?"

Perry on choosing Angela Bassett:

"Are you kidding me? At first in line [for] our vote, I was like, ‘I wonder if Angela would do this?’ Usually what happens is if I get an actor in mind who is extremely talented, it challenges me to write more material for them. And Angela, she has no limits when it comes to acting, she just goes."

On casting Rick Fox:

"I was writing [and] I knew that her son played basketball, because this is partly borrowed from a friend of mine who is an athlete, who is very successful and his father had nothing to do with him, completely dogged him out all of his life. And when he became a success, his father wanted to be in his life. It’s true of Shaq and to a whole lot of other people. I knew I wanted him to play sports, but I don’t know a lot about sports because as a kid I had asthma and every time I tried to play, my mother would say, ‘Sit your ass down, because I’m not going to the hospital with you tonight.’ So I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I was coming out of my house after writing the first scene with Harry and I made a left on Sunset and he was in a crosswalk. Rick was in a crosswalk with his trainer, so I almost hit him. I pulled over, we have a conversation, we exchanged numbers, and that’s how it came to be for him."

Perry casting a multi-racial ensemble:

"You know what I do: I never see race. Like the last movie, Why’d I Get Married?, there were all of these comments - I was even called racist because there were nothing but black people in the movie, which I could not believe. So I never go in thinking about race at all, I just write the characters. So this time when I saw this character [Cheryl] I said why don’t we try something different, but after writing the character."

Tyler Perry on his character, Madea:

"The only reason I put Madea in this film at all is to set up Madea Goes to Jail. That’s the next movie I start shooting in a couple of months and it is all about Madea and the Madea antics. But I needed to set it up, I needed her to be arrested ,and I certainly didn’t want to do it in Why’d I Get Married. So I thought Meet the Browns would be a great place to set it up, tease the audience, whet their palette for what’s coming next."

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