Exclusive: RJ Cyler Talks New Movie 'Emergency' and the Traumas Young Black Men Face

Amazon Prime’s Emergency is not your average buddy comedy. The film follows two best friends, Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins), and their friend Carlos (Sebastian Chacon) as they prepare for a legendary party tour during their college’s spring break. Sean has come up with a plan to make sure they hit up as many parties as possible in one night, but their festivities take a turn when they find a young white girl drunk and semi-conscious on their apartment floor with no explanation.

While they are eager to help her, they hesitate to call the police out of fear that they will be suspected of wrongdoing simply because they are three young men of color. They’re all just months away from graduation and can’t afford to jeopardize their futures, like Kunle’s goal of going to Princeton. Instead of letting loose at the parties as planned, their new mission is to try to get the girl to a hospital without raising any suspicion. The characters together embark on a stressful adventure that makes them grapple with the realities of how society and the authorities view them, regardless of their intelligence, accomplishments, or their hearts, and their stories also provide necessary social commentary with a hint of humor.

When the movie starts out, you get a sense that it’s going to be a buddy comedy of these kids who are looking to party, but then it gets a bit more serious. What did you think of the story when you first read the script?

RJ Cyler: It didn’t take much for me to sell myself on this script. I read 10 pages and I was like, “Yeah I’m down.” To see Sean as a character and also see Kunle as a character, both that I could relate to, but also kind of slip into their shoes, that made me excited about just playing and reading further.

When I actually got to finish the full script, I didn’t feel jarred to where I wanted to exit, or evade, because it was too much or too heavy. It wasn’t over the top. So just to have a refreshing sense of a movie that doesn’t just start the confrontation, but it starts the conversation first. That was very refreshing to read.

After finding a girl passed out on the floor, the natural reaction is to call the police. But as young Black men, that’s something they feel they can’t do because it puts them at risk. What was it like to be able to play that character and go through the emotions that he would feel in that scenario?

RC: For me, the situation itself is one that I’ve dealt with, not the young girl being passed out on my floor or anything, but where you call as the victim and then you become the suspect or you call for help and then you become the person in question. It gave me the opportunity to react and share how I felt in that moment. My life was actually at risk so I could not react how any human should be able to. I had to sit there with that trauma to be like, “OK, I just want to make it to the crib. I just really want to make it home. That’s it. I know I didn’t do anything, but that obviously doesn’t mean anything here.”

It was good to be able to go through that, even for the character, for me to be that much more, I guess you could say, believable. Carey is a director that really likes the real feel of what is happening in the scene. He doesn’t like to stretch too far for just the spectacle of things, but he really likes for you to be able to feel and understand, take a ride with characters in their shoes. And he made it very ingestible. The topic is very, very heavy but it’s so easy to go down. It’s like a smooth shot of tequila, which could go down very nicely, but it does have some kick to it if that makes sense.

There are little moments in this movie about performative activism. The neighbors were trying to call the police accusing the guys of being suspicious but they have a Black Lives Matter sign on their front yard. Do you think that was an important part of the story?

RC: Yeah, I do. You can’t just have the sign, you actually have to have the beliefs to want to change how people are treated and/or viewed. Just having a sign up ain’t enough. The belief factor is what we want to see. You don’t even have to go to the rallies, I just need you to treat people differently.

It’s so small, it is something that’s seen as such a small little add-on and this is why Carey is literally one of the greatest directors, mark my words, of not just our generation, but of the next, right? He’s going to go down as the next Spike Lee, for real. And it’s because he knows how to make the mind work in the smallest little effortless ways. It makes people think so much, it makes people self reflect so much.

What do you think is special about Sean and how is he different from Kunle?

RC: I think what’s special about Sean is he has a very unique experience from his upbringing. Sean had to grow up fast so a lot of his childhood, a lot of his innocence and a lot of the things that he didn’t get to have in his adolescence, he sees them in Kunle. Sean mimics the average human being in general. We put on a front of being OK, or not attached to this, like it’s cool to not give a fuck and all that. Like it’s cool for all that but it’s actually us saying like, “Dang if somebody actually told me that they cared this much, I wouldn’t be too bad with being in love or I wouldn’t be too bad being loved or loving somebody.”

It’s really the walk of what it is to be a young Black man, to be honest, and I feel like that’s what makes him special. They only kind of see us as these either violent characters or very athletic characters. Rather than be a fully rounded human being with feelings, wants, and ambitions that are past everything that they put us in the script to be. That’s where Kunle comes into play because he’s everything past what they would expect for us to be and he’s that with pride. He’s that unapologetically. That’s what makes Kunle stick out to Sean so much and for Sean to stick around in that, rather than to run away from it.

Kunle is the closest to, I guess you could say, the full, rounded human being that Sean knows. Kunle is where Sean would like to be someday. You feel me? He wants people to care for him like people care for Kunle, but don’t nobody know Sean, because Sean doesn’t let nobody in there like that. I guess you could say Kunle makes Sean better and Sean makes Kunle better in a way.