Her religiosity is unorthodox-she interprets the Bible’s “Peace, be still,” to refer to the “piece o’ steel” she keeps in her purse. She could steal your man and your wallet. (After his mother’s death, Perry learned that she had lied to him, and that his biological father was someone else.) Set the autobiographical inspiration aside, though, and you’ll notice that Madea bears little resemblance to older black women in the real world. Perry has explained that he based Madea, in part, on his own aunts and his beloved mother, who raised her son with a moral stringency that countered the moral deficiency of his father, who was abusive.
In his Madea films, Perry also plays a lawyerly version of himself, named Brian, a nephew of Madea’s who, with terrorized obedience, chauffeurs her around town after a judge suspends her license. The torment of Perry’s mommy drag is charmingly Freudian. On the movie’s poster, she lounges on a coffin that belongs to someone else, praise hands up. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to fully destroy his creation. “A Madea Family Funeral,” which was released earlier this month, is, according to Perry, the last Madea movie. “It’s time for me to kill that old bitch,” Perry told the radio host Bevy Smith, last fall. Perry did nearly “off” Madea once, in “Boo 2! A Madea Halloween,” a couple of years ago, but, like a zombie or like Jesus, whom she so merrily misquotes, she rose again.
As a dramatic actor, in thrillers like “Alex Cross,” and “Gone Girl,” Perry is capable of barrel-chested valor (though it would have been nearly impossible for anyone to summon gravitas as Colin Powell in Adam McKay’s “Vice,” given the hollow script, and the fact that Perry’s chin quiver calls to mind Madea’s neck roll did him no extra favors). Now he’s about to turn fifty, and has a child and a girlfriend offscreen he will probably one day be Hollywood’s first black male billionaire. For one thing, the suit is heavy and the makeup is smothering. He’s thought about killing her for at least a decade. Perry is Madea, but, in a sense, it’s Madea who owns Perry. Since 1999, when he first débuted Madea, in the theatre piece “I Can Do Bad All By Myself,” Perry has played his own matriarch, wearing a gray press-and-curl wig and a muumuu and covering his six-foot-five frame with a stuffed suit. But no one has stared down the barrel of her cultural menace more often than Perry himself. In nearly a dozen stage plays, and in as many movies, Madea has taken aim at no-good freeloaders and goody-goody authorities, all while spreading a hard-headed traditionalism herself. She pulls the pistol out of her purse as effortlessly as sane old ladies produce those awful strawberry bonbons. Has any contemporary commercial artist learned this lesson quite like Tyler Perry? His most famous character, the brusque grandmother Madea, packs an assault rifle and a Glock. Creators, with their special hubris, are at constant risk of being swallowed by the act of creation they give their inventions fabulous power and, in the process, lose control of them.