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.
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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.
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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.