Donald Glover is super busy, except when he’s not. That explains why during a chat with Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday night (March 29) the actor/rapper/producer/writer had a long list of projects to talk about after taking an extended hiatus from the spotlight, including updates on his Childish Gambino rap project, the recent debut of season 3 of Atlanta and a tantalizing tease of his return to the Star Wars universe.
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The multi-hyphenate star took the stage in an all-white outfit and a freshly-shorn head, which prompted host Kimmel to dive right into a joking reference to the instantly infamous Will Smith slap attack on Chris Rock at Sunday’s 2022 Oscars. “Now don’t slap me, but you’re bald,” Kimmel cracked.
“I’m not [Atlanta character] Earn anymore, I just took it all off,” said Glover, who added that he shaved it himself and that one of his kids was definitely not on board. “My middle child says, ‘daddy looks weird’… which I do, to him.” Glover said he was at the Vanity Fair Oscars party when he saw Smith storm the stage and hit Rock, but he wasn’t really into re-hashing the incident that spawned a river of hot takes.
“People are already tired of it,” he laughed. “People are like, ‘dang, I gotta read another article? It’s been 8 articles already!'” To be fair, Glover, who is also a stand-up comedian, said he’s had “a lot of stuff” happen to him while telling jokes on stage, including an incident where he suffered an “emotional attack” from a woman he’d been dating for a few weeks. They, admittedly, did not know each other that well, and after Glover invited her to his improv show, she drunkenly kept interrupting the proceedings by being “super loud.”
“And people are like, ‘who is she?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know!'” he said, recalling that his friends on stage eventually asked her to stop and leave, at which point she turned to him for help and he pretended not to know her. “And we never went on another date.”
Though he is an accomplished MC, despite what you may have heard, he did not have a rap battle with fellow comedian/actor Tiffany Haddish at a pre-Oscars party last Friday night. “Tiffany Haddish just came in and just galvanized everybody… and she did Tina Turner and I was just MCing just in awe,” he said, admitting that he thought he was getting a special command performance from The Afterparty star, only to find out that she “does that for everybody.”
And, despite what you may have read in a New York tabloid, there was no Verzuz-style showdown that night. “No, they saw two Black people [and] they were like, ‘oh, y’all must be rappin’,” he smiled.
Glover also broke down the just-debuted third season of his FX series Atlanta, which he said was the realization of his dream to tell “short stories.” That partially explained why last week’s first episode did not feature his character Earn until the final moments, but instead was a loose re-telling of the story of the real-life Hart family drama, in which a mother drunkenly drove her SUV off a cliff with her adopted children in it.
“It is kind of dangerous to do it [not feature the show’s main characters], but like I always just wanted it to be like a movie… I always want everything I do to be like an event,” he said of the series, which has long toyed with blurring the line between reality and fantasy. But also, because there was a nearly four-year gap between season 2 and 3, Glover said he wanted the payoff to feel special, like something “harrowing and cinematic.”
Kimmel then asked the two questions on everyone’s mind: what’s up with Childish and Lando? Glover was circumspect about the follow-up to his last full-length Gambino album, 2016’s Awaken, My Love!, saying that he’s “making a lot of music… I really love doing it, I’ve made a bunch of it,” without revealing any concrete release release plans.
With so many projects, the father of three said it’s harder to just jump freely from project-to-project these days while being present for his kids, so he blocks out time to visit his “art farm,” where he can go and be “as ADD as I want.” But, when Kimmel tried to get Glover to spill about the new Lando Calrissian project he’s working on for Disney+ that will reportedly find him re-upping as the space scoundrel he played in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, Glover was coy, replying, “am I?”
Laughing it off, he would only offer, “I have a lot of things… I like to blossom and then go away,” promising that he has a “ton of stuff” he’s been working on that will drop at some point.
Watch Glover on Jimmy Kimmel Live! below.