Keegan Micheal Key Says He and Jordan Peele Don't See Each Other Much Anymore

Comedian Keegan Michael Key admits he and his former comedy partner, Jordan Peele, don't see each other that much anymore, something he calls a tragedy...

From People

When Keegan-Michael Key first met Jordan Peele, he says, “It was a thrilling time in my life.”

Years before the duo known as Key & Peele would launch their 2012–2015 sketch comedy series of that name, the two were “sharing a mind” starring on Fox’s MADtv starting in 2004, Key, 53, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.

“We lived together for a few months and would write and talk about comedy — who we liked and why we liked them and how that worked in the architecture of what we were trying to build comedically,” he says.

Because they had both previously trained at Chicago’s Second City and “shared a creative language,” adds Key, “when we were on camera, it was alchemy. It was just like, ‘Why is this working?’”

Unfortunately, in the near-decade since the Emmy-winning Key & Peele concluded on Comedy Central, “we don't see each other that often anymore,” he says of Peele, 45. “Which is, to me, a tragedy.”

After taking the comedy world by storm with their hit series, Key and Peele have created chances to experience that alchemy again, producing and starring in the 2016 action-comedy film Keanu, appearing together in the first season of FX’s Fargo and voicing paired characters in 2019’s Toy Story 4 and 2022’s Wendell & Wild.

But, as Key notes, “your lives start to evolve and move in different directions.” Peele and wife Chelsea Peretti live in Los Angeles while Key and his wife Elle are in New York City, he adds.

“Our evolution, I think, is tied to both of what our desires are,” continues the Transformers One star. “His desire was to start exploring the horror genre, and my desire was to do more dramatic work like I had been trained in school.” After Key & Peele’s success, “both of us jumped to another platform — but we needed that first platform.”