Daniel Kaluuya had given up on acting before Jordan Peele approached him about the lead role in smash hit movie Get Out.

During an interview with his Get Out and Nope director for Essence magazine, the British actor revealed he had “checked out” of acting before getting the call about the 2017 horror because he felt so “disillusioned” with the industry.

“I’ve never told you this, but when you reached out to me and we had that Skype, I was really disillusioned with acting. I had stopped acting for like a year and a half,” he told Peele. “I checked out, because I was just like, this isn’t working. I wasn’t getting roles, because racism and all this kind of stuff – so you reaching out was like, Okay, I’m not crazy. It’s proper. It’s going to be all right.”

Kaluuya, 33, added that he “understood” Peele’s script when it came through and instantly knew “this is a hit, this is a banger”.

Following his Oscar-nominated turn in Get Out, Kaluuya appeared in films including Widows, Black Panther, Queen & Slim and Judas and the Black Messiah, for which he won an Academy Award.

He explained that the success of Get Out meant he was able to pick roles that excited him and stretched him as an actor.

“I was just like, If it’s not a ‘F**k yeah,’ it’s a no. That kind of cleaned house,” he shared. “I want to go into places that I don’t know I can. I want three-dimensional characters. I want to tell the story, no matter how big or how small. In Widows, I’m not in the film that much, but my character had an arc – he had a story and an evolution. As long as that’s there, then I can engage with it.”

Kaluuya and Peele’s latest collaboration, Nope, begins hitting cinemas from 20 July.

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