Deceit is the game’s name in Tyler Perry’s latest film, Tyler Perry’s Duplicity.
The movie, starring Kat Graham as Marley, Tyler Lepley as Tony, RonReaco Lee as Lt. Kevin Moore and Meagan Tandy as Fela, leaves no one off the table when it comes to lies, betrayal, and the ultimate plot twist(s).
What is ‘Tyler Perry’s Duplicity’ about?
According to an official film synopsis, “In Tyler Perry’s Duplicity, high-powered attorney Marley (Graham) faces her most personal case yet when she is tasked with uncovering the truth behind the shooting of her best friend Fela’s (Meagan Tandy) husband (Joshua Adeyeye). With the help of her boyfriend (Tyler Lepley) — a former cop turned private investigator — Marley’s search for what happened leads her down a treacherous maze of deception and betrayal.”
The emotionally challenging aspect of preparing for the intense themes housed in ‘Tyler Perry’s Duplicity’
For Tandy and Graham, there were high stakes in stepping into characters whose central identities revolved around grief, manipulation, and more, but both actors were up for the challenge.
“I don’t want to, you know, spoil anything, but there was just a line that I needed to not cross,” Tandy told Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “It was something that Tyler [Perry] really wanted to make sure that I didn’t go over into. And so having to somehow play, you know, — hmm, don’t spoil anything —but somehow, having to play different emotions all at once and make them believable and make them human for Fela, I did find that to be very challenging, but it was actually what drew me to the character. You know, it made it fun.”
Graham added, “Anything that’s kind of close to your heart is going to be difficult in the best way to play. I had my own personal history with losing a family member to murder, and I felt connected to this role because there were so many elements to it that made me realize that there’s so many injustices — things that I’ve experienced personally in my own personal life that never got the visibility or the justice it deserved and then things that I deal with as a humanitarian, and there’s things within the industry — and there were so many of these moments that really did feel connected to my own life, and those are hard to bring to screen, because you have to be vulnerable.” She continued, “You have to admit, on some level, if you feel like you failed personally by not being able to make the situation better or bring justice to something or get people to care about a cause. And, you know, ‘Maybe I’m not powerful enough. Maybe I don’t have a big enough voice,’ and you have to kind of go through your own process of finding your own voice within a character like this. So it was not easy, but it was definitely therapeutic.”
(Spoiler Alert — Don’t read further if you don’t want to be spoiled.)
RonReaco Lee on stepping into a role that is out of his ordinary
For the first time, beloved actor RonReaco Lee steps into the role of a villain, and it’s for a character he’s always wanted to play.
“I always wanted to play a police officer. I’d never done one in a film,” Lee shared. He added that he rarely gets the opportunity to play the villain.
He continued, “I’ve been in the industry a minute, and so people get used to seeing you one way, and you do, you kind of have to really really fight to get them to see you as something else. And so whenever given an opportunity, and really, credit just has to go to Mr. Tyler Perry, because, you know, a lot of times, he’ll see something in an actor that the actor might not even see in himself or herself, and once you get that vote of confidence, I think it’s just, once he hires you, now you just go, you just drop in. So, it was great. I enjoyed it. I look forward to playing more roles that, again, take me outside of the box.”
A film that explores two sides of the spectrum
While Duplicity is rooted in some dark themes like police brutality and the dangers of justice falling into the hands of the wrong people, the film does have moments that spark healthy conversation around both the darkness and the light.
“The surface of it is one that’s a slow-burning thriller,” Lepley said. “It’s really juicy; it’s like an hour and 50 minutes or whatever it is. For just under two hours, it’s going to be a lot of fun and lots of just twists and turns, man. It’s such a dynamic story. But then underneath that, there’s some social injustices that are really going on that always deserve to be at the forefront of the conversations when we’re battling this on a daily, you know? I feel like being able to take the fun away from it in terms of the storyline, but then also to take the depth of what we’re going through as a culture as well.”
Tyler Perry’s Duplicity is now streaming on Prime Video.
