Chris Rock: 'Getting divorced made people look at me in a different light'

‘Is this it?’ comes a disembodied voice from a blank computer window. Even drained of the energy and octave-leaping animation familiar from stand-up stage, awards-show podium and cartoon franchise, it’s instantly recognisable.

‘How do I look? I can’t even tell… I need a shave,’ Chris Rock says, rubbing a lean jaw snowed with greying stubble, as his laptop camera switches on. With his thick-framed black glasses the star best known here for blockbuster comedy specials like HBO’s Bring the Pain (1996) and Kill the Messenger (2008), and the voice of Marty, the zebra in the Madagascar films, Rock looks like a stylish middle-aged academic.

‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ he says.

Rock is speaking from his apartment in Manhattan, and is wearing a black sweatshirt by Californian streetwear brand Undefeated. Taken together with the glasses, the sombre messaging reads: at the age of 56, one of the highest-earning American funny men, with 5.2 million Twitter followers, four Emmys and three Grammys, the two-time Academy Awards host and recipient of a rumoured $40 million Netflix deal is going serious.

‘Yeah, I’m ageing into good parts,’ he says of the reinvention of Chris Rock. ‘I’m in my 50s, I’m a father with two kids, I’ve been divorced. Sometimes you just have to live real life. So I guess there’s a little weight there I didn’t have as a younger guy. And I’m starting to get really good offers.’

The high-octane Rock who brilliantly, witheringly, hilariously skewers race, racism, relationships, police brutality and societal inequity? He hasn’t showed up today. After successfully transitioning from the New York comedy stage to Hollywood comedy movies, Rock is now winning heavyweight dramatic roles. He’s not long finished shooting the as-yet-untitled latest movie from David O Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle), alongside a typically rich ensemble from the director that includes Christian Bale, Robert De Niro and Margot Robbie.

He’s also a producer and star of Spiral, the ninth instalment in the billion-dollar-grossing Saw horror franchise in which he and Max Minghella (The Handmaid’s Tale) play detectives investigating an elaborately inventive psychopathic cop killer.

‘It’s almost a rite of passage for the comedian, especially the black comedian, to do the cop movie. Chris Tucker’s got Rush Hour, Eddie Murphy’s got Beverly Hills Cop, Kevin Hart’s got Ride Along, Martin Lawrence did Blue Streak. It’s our tradition, literally. So I guess everybody’s done it except [me]. Well, Richard Pryor never did one,’ he adds of one of his heroes.

‘And I’d been fighting it for years. But doing a cop movie with a horror, I thought, OK, that’s an original twist on it. And to get a little bit of humour into this horror doesn’t feel derivative.’

‘You say it’s a very dramatic role, but I don’t think it’s any one thing,’ Minghella tells me over the phone. ‘Chris’s performance is very multi-faceted. This is a very crude example, but in the first Beverly Hills Cop movie, Eddie Murphy has this incredible ability to go from talking about his friend who has just died to making a joke, to leaning into something very emotional. Chris found a very similar balance in this movie.’

Perhaps even more impressive is Rock’s starring role in the new series of Channel 4’s Fargo. Supported by Jessie Buckley, Jason Schwartzman and Ben Whishaw, Rock is top of the bill in the fourth instalment of the show, which creator Noah Hawley spun out of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar-winning 1996 film. Each of the crime drama’s series is set in the Midwest in a different decade.

This series is set in the earliest era yet, with events taking place in Kansas City in 1950. Rock plays Loy Cannon, leader of a black crime syndicate. They’re vying for power with the local Mafia, who previously fought the Irish mob, who, in turn, had fought Jewish gangsters. As Cannon, Rock challenges the boss of the Italians, saying, ‘You think part of being American is standing on my neck.’

So is it, at heart, the story of 20th-century American race relations and racism? ‘Ah, yeah, I guess so,’ Rock replies slowly. ‘I guess it’s about how each crime [culture dominates] – the Italians, the Irish and now it’s the black gangsters. America’s founded on racism and genocide, and this is just another example of that.’

Rock grew up in a working-class family in Brooklyn, the eldest of six (three of his brothers are also in the entertainment industry). His father Julius was a truck driver; his mother Rose, an educator, also fostered 17 children. Bussed into white neighbourhoods for school, he was mercilessly bullied. Teenage Chris had his lunch money stolen – kids literally hanging him upside down to empty his pockets – and bags of urine thrown at him. His parents eventually pulled him out of high school; he later dropped out completely.

He transposed these experiences, in diluted form, to his semi-autobiographical sitcom Everybody Hates Chris, which ran for four seasons from 2005 to 2009. As Hawley said last year, ‘I just thought: “He’s that guy.” Chris had started with nothing, a skinny kid with no permission to get up on that stage, and now he’s a sort of elder statesman – he’d hate me for saying that – someone who has built an empire for himself. And that’s who Loy is, too.

Even without that context, it was an intense undertaking for Rock – the 11 episodes requiring almost a year of filming. Why was that kind of demanding role right for him at the time?

‘I just want to be in good stuff, man. And the kind of movies I like, no one makes any more,’ says Rock, who cites David Fincher’s The Social Network as in his top five. ‘So, this is the time. And my life’s changing, my kids are going to college and stuff,’ Rock adds of daughters Lola, 19 in June, and Zahra, 17 this month. ‘I lived in Chicago basically for almost a year, shooting a show. I can concentrate on my acting and work on this character. I don’t have to run back for a violin recital!’ he smiles.

His marriage breakdown was, wholly understandably, a turning point, on every level. Rock filed for divorce from Malaak Compton-Rock, 51, founder of non-profit StyleWorks, which helps women back into the job market, in 2014, after 18 years of marriage. The split, protracted and messy, was legally finalised in 2016.

The comedian owned up to the reasons for the end of the relationship in his 2018 Netflix special Tambourine. ‘I was not a good husband,’ he admits in a section of a show compelling for entirely different reasons than his jokes about racist cops and teaching his kids to fear everything white (including napkins and vanilla ice cream). ‘I was addicted to porn and, you know, I was 15 minutes late everywhere. When you watch too much porn, you know what happens? You become sexually autistic. You have a hard time with eye contact and verbal cues. You get desensitised.

‘I’m an asshole, man,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t listen. I wasn’t kind. I cheated… I’m not bragging. I’d go on the road, end up sleeping with three different women…’

I ask Rock why he spilled those harsh truths about the demise of his marriage, and he replies that that’s what he’s always done. ‘Hopefully my personal life mirrors other people’s. When I was courting, other people were going through the same thing. When I had kids, the same. When I got divorced, other people… You probably went through that with your friends group. At some point all our parents will be dying. You just keep going with it.

‘It’s weird,’ he reflects of his first stand-up special in 10 years, ‘it’s a departure from the stand-up I was doing. It was more introspective. And a lot of big-time directors were seeing me as a grown man for the first time. Even the first time I met with Noah, he mentioned some joke he’d seen in Tambourine. So I don’t think I got a part because I got divorced. But I think getting divorced and dealing with all the [challenges] made people look at me in a different light.’ At the same time, making his life an open book… ‘that’s just the kind of comedian I am. I’ve been doing these specials since ’96 and Bring the Pain. They serve two purposes: my state of the union in America and the world, and then an update on my personal life, for anybody that gives a crap.’ The protracted divorce proceedings coincided with his mother’s treatment for cancer.

She is now recovered, but it was a gruelling time, especially as his divorce lawyer and the Sloan Kettering hospital where she was being treated were on the same road.

‘They were literally across the street from each other!’ he recalls, laughing, incredulous still. ‘Sometimes I would leave my divorce lawyer and meet my mother at chemo. But we got through it. If I can get through that, I can get through anything.

‘So that was a difficult time. And you’ve got kids and you can’t act like anything’s wrong. That’s your best acting. You’re going through that, you got to pick your kid from school and they’re happy about something and you gotta just be happy.’

Rock took a decade off from the touring life of a stand-up, intent on being able ‘to go to my daughter’s basketball games, to take the other one horseback riding, whatever it was. I only did movies that were [filming] three hours from the house. I did a play for a while!’

That play, his Broadway debut, was The Motherf—er with the Hat, which ran for three months in 2011. ‘I had to grow up really quick as an actor in that play, and a lot of that experience has rubbed off. Fargo is better because of it. Top Five is better than my other movies because I did it after Motherf—er with the Hat.’

It was also a Scott Rudin production, as was Top Five, the 2014 comedy which Rock wrote, directed and starred in. Rudin has recently been called out with allegations of abusive workplace behaviour. Did he bully Rock? ‘Did Scott bully me? Not at all. I had a great experience with Scott. I don’t know what happened to other people, and I feel bad for anybody that got hurt. But I get it – I’m a celebrity, whatever… So maybe I don’t see everything that’s going on. But I never saw anything bad or whatever, for anybody, honestly.’

There are other entertainment industry figures whose work Rock has enjoyed, or who have been mentors, who have been accused or convicted of criminal or amoral behaviour: Bill Cosby and Louis CK, for instance, or Woody Allen (who denies all claims of abuse). Can he separate the man from the allegation and still enjoy the art?

‘I mean…’ he begins, clearly reluctant to go down this path. ‘I dunno, man. I don’t know what to say. If I answer that, I’m a bad guy. Did I like Annie Hall the first time I saw it? Absolutely. Did I like [Cosby cartoon] Fat Albert as a kid? Absolutely. Did I like [Michael Jackson’s] Thriller as a kid? Yeah. Other than that… I got nothing to do with what’s going on with those guys.’

But has cancel culture gone too far? Again, Rock squirms. ‘Ah, you know, man, it’s not up to me… I try not to get involved, honestly. I’m just, you know, a guy, I’m in my 50s, if I’m in front of an audience, I try to make ’em laugh. Other than that, what can I do?’

Chris Rock mostly spent the past year’s lockdown in Alpine, New Jersey, in a house he bought round the corner from his former family home. ‘It’s suburban, man. I only live there for child-custody reasons. It was easier for my kids to go back and forth between the houses. But my oldest is in college now, and my youngest is in senior [year], so now we just moved into the city. She’ll be in Alpine when she’s with her mom, but now me and her are in SoHo,’ he says.

It is, for now, a single life, too. Having last year ended a four-year relationship with actor Megalyn Echikunwoke he is not currently seeing anyone – which he says is ‘OK. We’ll see. “We” is better than “me”, and right now it’s me, and me’s OK.’

Rather, he’s focusing on writing material for a new stand-up show. As a comedian who’s always been socially and racially attuned, surely the upsurge in energy in the Black Lives Matter movement is percolating into his new material? ‘If I can figure out a new take on what’s gone, I definitely will [include it]. But, boy, it gets harder and harder. Marvin Gaye only wrote What’s Going On one time. That’s the only protest album he did! And I’ve been talking about this stuff for 25 years.

‘Also, especially with George Floyd, I don’t ever see [me] telling a joke about that. Of course I would never make fun of him, there’s something so tragic about what happened to that guy.’

When I ask if his own experiences of racism in childhood are still reverberating now, his reply is surprising. ‘Yeah, it’s weird,’ he smiles, ‘I’ve been doing therapy. That’s what I did during Covid: lots of therapy!’ Rock’s seven-hours-a-week regimen itself grew out of him being tested, at a friend’s urging, for Asperger’s. The diagnosis was that he has non-verbal learning disorder, which is characterised as a ‘profile that includes strengths in verbal abilities contrasted with deficits in visual-spatial abilities’.

As Rock explained to The Hollywood Reporter last year, ‘all I understand are the words’, which means the approximately 80 per cent of communication that is non-verbal is lost on him. ‘By the way, all of those things are really great for writing jokes,’ he said, ‘they’re just not great for one-on-one relationships… And I’d always just chalked it up to being famous. Any time someone would respond to me in a negative way, I’d think, “Whatever, they’re responding to something that has to do with who they think I am.” Now, I’m realising it was me. A lot of it was me.’

He had blithely assumed that over the years he’d dealt with his vicious childhood bullying through humour. ‘But success does not erase trauma,’ he tells me now. ‘It just doesn’t. So I definitely had to go back through therapy and really go through my childhood... The key thing is, I forgive everybody that was involved. Again I don’t want to criticise the culture of whatever,’ he says, ‘but what happened to me happened 30 [sic] years ago. I could out everybody that called me a n—r and everybody that hit me, and put their faces on Instagram, and say their names and all that stuff, right? And they would never work again. Their lives would be absolutely destroyed.

‘So I’m gonna pray that they learnt their lesson… I got kids going to college – wouldn’t that suck if some kid couldn’t go to college because their dad called me a n—r in 1979? So I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna take the very high road.’

That mental robustness is also matched by a new-found physical fitness. The skinny teenage Rock who was 125lb is now only 147lb, but muscled, the result of lifting weights, learning to swim over lockdown and cutting sugar from his diet.

‘I’m in good shape. People think I bulked up but I actually lost weight. I gotta lot of muscle though! I was hanging with Floyd Mayweather the other night and we’re the same weight! No, we weren’t sparring! But I’m thinking about playing a boxer in a movie,’ he adds, possibly joking.

He barely drinks, ‘and I quit all sleep aids. I was on an Ambien/Melatonin-every-night thing. And I had really bad brain fog. I was a functional Ambien addict, which affected everything – it affected my ability to concentrate, honestly.’

And, broadly, it’s time to be on top of his game, as he sees more opportunities opening up in a Hollywood that is, finally, embracing diversity. ‘Hollywood is absolutely changing,’ he says. ‘A lot of black people are doing amazing things right now. I hear there are more [black] executives – I’m not really seeing it, but I’m hearing it!’

As to what his role has been in helping affect that change, he’s clear. ‘I worked – I worked the whole time. I did a show with a bunch of black people called Everybody Hates Chris, and there were black people in front of the camera and behind the camera. I made however many movies, hired a lot of black men and women… So there’s always more to do, but the best thing you can do is work. And I definitely did not not work.

‘The fact is, when you see something like Black Panther or Judas and the Black Messiah [you realise that] the possibilities are so endless. That’s the real thing,’ notes the black man who hosted the Oscars in 2016, a year of no black nominees. ‘I just saw Daniel Kaluuya on Saturday Night Live,’ he says of the Brit who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Judas, ‘and he was so funny. There are so many great people out there doing great stuff, it just wakes you up.’

After a gruelling few years in his private life, changed circumstances will do that, too. ‘I’m definitely getting really good opportunities right now, so that’s energising. I’m getting a second wind ’cause my kids are leaving the house! Losing half your money in a divorce makes you read more scripts, I’ll tell you that!’ he laughs again.

‘Hey, man, it happened,’ he shrugs about the end of his marriage, ‘and I wish it didn’t happen, honestly, on some levels. But, you know, it’s got me where I’m at right now. And I wouldn’t change anything.’

So how will the emergence of Chris Rock, Serious Actor impact on his comedy? He begins by pointing out that he is ‘not not being funny’ in Fargo and Spiral.

‘Silly stuff cracks me up,’ he continues, ‘but as you get older you gotta have a dramatic element to your comedy. ’Cause your audience, their lives get more dramatic. Silly stuff is for younger people.’

Series four of Fargo begins on Sunday 9 May at 10pm on Channel 4, and will be on All 4. Spiral is released in cinemas on 17 May