Keegan-Michael Key Reaches into the Past With ‘Midnight Run’ and ‘Electric Ladyland’

6. “The Great Eastern” by Howard Rodman

I read a book right on the edge of Covid. It’s a piece of historical fiction called “The Great Eastern,” and it’s fantastic.

There was a civil engineer in the 19th century in England by the name Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And he helped build the tunnel underneath the Thames, and he did all this in the 1850s, 1860s. A ship called the Great Eastern suffered from an explosion. That’s all historical fact. But Howard Rodman, the author, what he did is you find out it was actually a terrorist attack. A gentleman blew up the ship, and then kidnapped Brunel. And you find out, through the story, that the person who kidnapped him is Captain Nemo.

It’s great. It’s been my favorite read of the year so far.

7. “Electric Ladyland” by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

I’m an enormous Jimi Hendrix fan. I think that “Electric Ladyland,” which was his third album, is an absolute masterpiece. And something that if I ever really want to get lost in a song, my favorite song on that album is a song called “1983 … (A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” And it’s like a whole big opus. And I love this song. It’s one of these great songs that has movements in it. I don’t even know how he makes the sound, but these wonderful sounds of, like, sea bells. Like, foghorn-y sounds and sea gulls. He paints a seascape with sound, and makes bubbly sounds with the bass guitar and the guitar. And the whole song is about being someone who’s submerging underneath water, because that’s going to be a place to exist in the future.

8. East Asian Cinema

I’m a big fan of kung fu and wuxia cinema. There was a movie that came out in 2002 called “Hero,” which is a Zhang Yimou film, with Jet Li, Tony Leung, and Zhang Ziyi. But it’s just one of the most visually sumptuous things I’ve ever seen in my life. Every character is represented by a color. And it reminds me a lot of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran.” Which again, it’s something that plays with different factions and different characters being explained by color, or influencing you, the viewer, by the color. It’s another one of these films that I could watch whenever. It’s almost like my eyes are having Thanksgiving dinner almost every 10 minutes. I’ve always had a kind of steady diet of those movies in my life.

9. “Whoopi Goldberg on Broadway”

I think one of the most influential things for me as an artist, but also for me seeing the world in a new way that’s always stuck for me, is when I used to listen to Whoopi Goldberg. I didn’t get to see her on Broadway, but my parents had the album, and I would listen to her play these different characters. And it was astounding. Here’s this African-American woman who’s playing several characters. She’s playing a woman with disabilities, she plays a young girl who’s Black but she had blonde hair. She’s playing a surfer girl who, as I’m listening to it, I’m hearing her voice, I’m going, “OK, yes, this girl is supposed to be white.”