- As a child, Jordan Peele appeared on a March 1994 ABC News special called "President Clinton Answering Children's Questions". The question he asked President Clinton, "Um, yeah, I was just wondering, how can you help the families where there's a mom, and she's taking care of a kid or kids, and the father isn't willing or isn't able to pay child support?," was inspired by his own family's situation.
- He and comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key made cameos as 'gangstas' in the music video for 'Weird Al' Yankovic's parody "White & Nerdy" (2006).
- In 2018, he became the first African-American screenwriter to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He won the award for Get Out (2017).
- He was so insulted when Sony offered him the role of Poop in The Emoji Movie (2017) that this inspired him to retire from acting and focus entirely on being a screenwriter and film director.
- He auditioned by playing Barack Obama for Saturday Night Live (1975) and was offered to become a feature player but when the Writer's Strike came to pass in 2008, he found out that Mad TV (1995) would be continuing and lost the role and the opportunity to be on "SNL". "SNL" cast member Fred Armisen plays Obama on that show and Peele now gets to write and perform his own Obama sketches on Key and Peele (2012).
- After his feature film writing/directing debut Get Out (2017) debuted to near-unanimous critical acclaim and blockbuster box office earnings, Peele announced that he had up to four other films that would be horror features that, like his first film (which dealt with racism) would address social issues through a genre framework. Producer Jason Blum said separately that his Blumhouse production group would make all of those films with Peele.
- Along with partner Keegan-Michael Key, one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. (April 2014)
- His father, Hayward Peele, was African-American, from a North Carolina family. His mother, Lucinda J. Williams, is white, and has English, with more distant Scottish and Dutch, ancestry. She is the daughter of Earl Haworth Williams and Josephine Helen Taylor, and has roots in the United States going back to Colonial America of the 1600s, specifically Maryland and Massachusetts.
- He and his wife Chelsea Peretti had their first child together (2017).
- Merited a place in Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People" issue with an homage penned by writer-director Barry Jenkins. (May 2017)
- Resided in the Netherlands for several years.
- Both he and partner Keegan-Michael Key were dramatically featured in a series of comic-photo examples of fictional employees demonstrating "The Saintly Way to Succeed" in a cover story and lengthy article with that title in the March 31, 2013 issue of New York magazine.
- Has directed one actor to an Academy Award nomination: Daniel Kaluuya, who was nominated for Get Out (2017).
- His mother, Lucinda Williams, is not the singer/songwriter.
- To date, he has worked with three cast members from the Marvel film Black Panther (2018), on three of his feature films: Daniel Kaluuya (W'Kabi), Lupita Nyong'o (Nakia) and Winston Duke (M'Baku).
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