On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
Dewayne Perkins has been here before. In 2023, the comedian and writer hosted the grand return of IndieWire Honors, fresh off the release of his horror-comedy “The Blackening” after spending seven years willing it into existence from a sketch he dreamed up on a couch. Now, the Chicago native is back to host the ceremony again on June 4, timed to IndieWire’s 30th anniversary, and even more has changed for him.
“The Blackening” went on to become a box-office success and genuine cultural touchstone. “The Studio,” on which he plays publicity head Tyler, made Emmy history as the first freshman comedy series to earn 13 wins. And Perkins, who spent the better part of a decade building his own door into Hollywood, is enjoying the rewards of that work as the industry actively seeks him out.
That much becomes clear quickly when Perkins starts talking about what he’s been working on. He’s currently touring a one-man show called “How Being Black and Gay Made Me Better Than You,” most recently to a sold-out performance at the Netflix Is A Joke Festival. The title alone tells you something about the register he’s operating in.
Ask him where he wants to take the show, and he doesn’t reach for careful language. “I see myself like Beyoncé. A bunch of dancers, fog, smoke, confetti, truly just having the same feeling I feel when I go to a concert,” he told IndieWire, “I want that to be my Coachella.” The ideal future would be bringing that live experience to a platform, so it could reach the audiences that can’t get to a theater. It’s an ambitious vision, but ambition has always been the engine.
“Touring my one-man show really allowed me to lean back into my body more, where I had to be very conscious of my instrument, my energy,” he said. “Being able to really use my body in its fullness helped me sharpen that; training for breath control and diction and volume. And then my relationship to a live audience gave me more insight and more experience to bring into my comedy.”
It is a notable thing for someone who spent years in writers’ rooms to be talking about his body as an instrument. But that is precisely the point. Perkins doesn’t silo his disciplines; he lets them inform each other. “The Studio” is the clearest example of what that looks like in practice.
Playing Tyler on the Apple TV comedy meant Perkins needed to separate out his experience in the industry from his character’s place in it. For a writer who has long understood that writing himself into projects was the surest path to creative control, acting requires a different entry point. “Usually I start from a place of comparison, to see what parts of the character feel like they are organically a part of me, to see how big or small that crossover is,” he said. Using that as a foundation he adds the layers necessary that are not him.
In this instance, the overlap was immediate and specific. “We’re both Black and we have the experience of being the token Black person in a workspace. That is an experience I can pull from directly,” he said. What he had to build from scratch was the professional texture of a studio PR executive.
The show also gave him an education in what happens to a project after the writing stops. As a veteran of multiple writers’ rooms, Perkins understood the process of making a show from the inside out, but always from the writing side of the wall.
“As a writer, your function kind of stops in the room unless you are a producer,” he said. “Being able to be a part of the show in a front-facing way just made me realize how much work goes into creating a show post-writing. The energy, the function of the actors in terms of marketing, in terms of the campaign. I just never experienced that before.”
Perkins can’t say much about Season 2 (in fact, his exact words were “I can’t say a damn thing”), but on the subject of Madonna joining the cast, he’s both genuinely excited and entirely unsurprised. “At this point the shock is just, how far can they go?” For a show that has already convinced Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, and Ted Sarandos to show up and poke fun at themselves, Madonna feels less like a coup and more like a natural extension of the show’s reach. “That feels right,” Perkins said. For “The Studio,” apparently, that’s the bar.
Preparing for IndieWire Honors is not all Perkins is working on: he’s actively writing the script for “The Blackening” sequel. “I’m literally going back to writing the script after this interview,” he said. “It’s still being developed, but I really love what we’re cooking up.”
The writer and star loves that the original is still finding new audiences. When it landed on Netflix, a new wave of viewers discovered it, and Perkins has watched the film earn the kind of informal immortality that can’t be manufactured. “Having people consider it a classic, having people put it in their yearly watch. Every Halloween, every Juneteenth, every holiday season. That was kind of the dream,” Perkins said.
He’s not going back to the sequel empty-handed. “Chemistry creates good art, whether that’s acting, whether that’s with above-the-line people, below-the-line people,” he said. “The relationships were imperative to making ‘The Blackening’ good. I’ve been taking that with me and using that as a litmus for future projects: Knowing who I want to collaborate with. That deeply changed my approach to art and how to foster relationships within the industry.”
Before either project is ready, Perkins has an awards show to host and a night to curate. He is characteristically energized by the possibility of play. Last time, he arrived with a musical dance number and a bob. He’s not ready to reveal what this year holds.
“I’m currently just trying to figure out what would be the most fun, how I want to present myself, what energy I want to bring for that night,” he said. “Just having the space to play is very fun. I’m looking forward to filling that space.”
What he is clear about is the responsibility underneath the performance. Having been through the Emmys campaign cycle at full volume, he understands what the room will contain when he takes the stage. “FYC and these campaigns, it’s a lot of energy, it’s a lot of showing up, it’s a lot of being present,” he said. “If people are giving me their time and attention, I just want to make it a worthwhile time. I’m the vibe curator. I just want to make sure I’m presenting something that I would want to experience as well.”
Perkins’ instinct to measure work by whether you would want to receive it yourself has always been present. It runs from the sketch he wrote on a couch that became “The Blackening” to the sequel he’ll return to writing the moment this conversation ends. The litmus stays the same.
