Marlon Wayans on Breaking Down and Crying Over Late Parents During Standup Set: 'Like You, I’m Hurting'

Marlon Wayans says the emotional openness at the core of his most recent special Good Grief has continued to help not only himself, but many fans who have also endured their own experiences of loss.

In a recent interview with Lewis Howes for The School of Greatness, Wayans, who played George Raveling in last year’s Air, spoke passionately about how he’s long known where he was going in his career and has thus worked hard to keep a level head while avoiding doing “dumb shit.” This prompted Howes to ask Wayans what a higher power might tell him when it comes to how best to provide “serve through creativity,” to borrow the host’s phrase.

“Keep working and building and stay on your path. You’re doing great,” Wayans said about 27 minutes into the interview. “And I see it now because my last standup, Good Grief, was about my parents dying, about how to grieve, how to get through it. At minute 57, I’m making people laugh. I’m talking about changing my daddy’s Pampers and my mom’s Pampers and talking about their private parts. I got people cracking up. I got it all for 57 minutes. And then, it hit me. I was running from my own pain.”

As Wayans recalled, he “broke down onstage” while talking about his late mother, though he ultimately decided not to cut this part out of the final footage.

“I broke down. I cried,” Wayans said. "Because the reality of my parents being gone hit me. It did [hit me before] but it wasn’t supposed to hit me in a show when I’m filming a special. And it did and I was like, aright cool. I was going to cut that out but I was like, no. Keep it in. Because I need people to understand that I, like you, I’m hurting. But life goes on and we still look for smiles. I get so many messages in my inbox about Good Grief on Amazon Prime, about how it affected them, how it helped them, helped them grieve. They lost their parents too, we’re in the same club, gang gang. And how they cried with me and they thanked me because they were in a place of depression and I helped them see their way out because I showed myself my way out. So, that’s healing.”

Deeper into the conversation, Wayans was asked to look ahead, including by way of a specific hypothetical scenario regarding what he would want to hear from his late mother, Elvira, on his last day on Earth after “living as long as you want.” Understandably, this question moved Wayans, who took a pause to settle into the emotions it brought up, resulting in a remarkably vulnerable moment from the actor and comedian.

“Big boy, you did good,” he said, speaking from his mother’s perspective. “You made me proud, your father proud. I’m looking at God, he’s smiling. You did right by our family, made sure the grandkids and the great grandkids and everybody was good. You took care of your brothers and your sisters that I told you that I made for you, and you’ve been an honorable child. You made the world laugh. I always knew you would.”

Here, Wayans started to cry, though he continued shortly after by stepping back into his mother’s voice.

“Your father and I are up here waiting on you,” he said, adding, “I close my eyes and wake up, hugging my parents.”

Elvira Alethia died in 2020 at 82. Three years later, Wayans’ father, Howell, died. These days, Wayans said, he doesn’t “cry about them a lot” but has instead entered a new stage of his relationship with that everlasting grief.

“What’s good is I’ve gotten through crying every day,” he told Howes. “Now you get to that point you have to think about it, you have to visit it. What does that feel like? Now I’m ready for whatever I’ve been asking God for. I know I’m ready, even dramatically, because I’ve always been a good dramatic actor but I’ve had a very happy life, so it’s hard for me to manufacture pain. I could get to the tears but now since my parents are gone, I know I got wings. Because it’s so easy for me to access those emotions. … Now, just open the safe. Let it out.”

See more of Marlon and Lewis' conversation below.

Good Grief, filmed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, is now available on Prime Video. Among the projects next on Wayans’ slate is a horror title produced under Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw banner.