Tyler Perry tells Terry Gross about creating the character of Madea:

Madea is a cross between my mother and my aunt and watching Eddie Murphy, the brilliant Eddie Murphy, do The Klumps. I thought — maybe I should try my hand at a female character. And that’s what came up. I thought I’d imitate the funniest person that I know, and she is the exactly the PG version of my mother and my aunt, and I loved having an opportunity to pay homage to them. She’s a strong, witty, loving, I mean really, just like my mother used to be before she died. She would beat the hell out of you but make sure the ambulance got there in time to make sure they could set your arm back, you know what I mean? Because the love was there inside all of it. I know it sounds really strange, but that’s the old-school mentality. That’s why I think the character is so popular, because a lot of people miss that type of grandmother, everybody is so worried about being politically correct that she’s no longer around.

The thing that helped me the most was understanding who he was as a child. The man was found — he and my aunt, and my uncle … they were all in this drainage canal and they were found by a white man who saw the kids and brought them to a woman named May to raise, who lived on some of the property that the white man owned. … He left the children there with her and she was 14 years old. And her father was a former slave and a very old man who was bedridden at the time, very old and dying, and everything that she knew to do was to beat the children — so everything my father did, whatever he did wrong … she would put him in a potato sack, tie him in a tree and she would beat him for everything he did wrong, so that is what he came out of. And understanding who he was helped me to be able to forgive a lot of his behavior and what he tried to pass on to me. It doesn’t excuse it, but it gave me an opportunity to understand who he was.

— Tyler Perry on forgiving his abusive father

Several of Perry’s films are told from female perspectives, which he says was a result of his childhood experience. “My father who was there in the house, he wasn’t at all a role model,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And my mother who was trying to protect me from him as best she could, she took me everywhere with her, which gave me a tremendous amount of sensitivity to the things women go through. … I would spend more time at the laundromat and Lane Bryant than any young boy should. [In my writing] I’m speaking from the little boy who’s at her apron, looking up at the world and seeing all that I’m seeing these women go through.”

Perry was 18 or 19 when he was first inspired to write and act. He was watching The Oprah Winfrey Show, he explains, and”[Oprah] said it was cathartic to write things down and I, at the time, didn’t know what ‘cathartic’ meant, I had to find a dictionary to look it up. And once I did, I started writing a lot of my own experiences down.” He didn’t have much privacy at home, so he used different character names to disguise himself in case anyone found his writing.

- via Fresh Air interview with Tyler Perry: From Madea to Family Man

Photo credit: Sidney Baldwin/2012 Summit Entertainment LLC

Good morning! 

Today’s guest: Tyler Perry. He stars in the new action thriller, Alex Cross.