Keegan-Michael Key Says It’s a ‘Tragedy’ That He No Longer Works with Jordan Peele

Since Key & Peele ended its epic five-season run on Comedy Central back in 2015, its titular stars “don’t see each other that often anymore,” Keegan-Michael Key recently told PEOPLE. “Which is, to me, a tragedy.”

If you’re looking for the juicy details on a messy comedy feud, you’ll have to look elsewhere. The reason Key no longer works much with Jordan Peele is mainly due to logistics. “Your lives start to evolve and move in different directions,” Key said. “Moving in different directions” is literal — he lives in New York City while Peele lives in Los Angeles with comic/actress wife Chelsea Peretti. Living multiple time zones away makes impromptu meetups impractical. 

When the two comics met on MADtv, “it was a thrilling time in my life,” Key explained. “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 credits their shared Second City background for their comic mind-meld. Those improvisational lessons meant they “shared a creative language,” Key said. “When we were on camera, it was alchemy. It was just like, ‘Why is this working?’”

The work on MADtv was good, but it went up a level when the two broke off on their own. They stuck to the script in the first season of Key & Peele but leaned on those Second City chops as the show progressed. “It wasn’t till the second season, third season that (we’d) loosen up and improvise,” he said. “And we wrote some sketches that were just very strange and weird. And that was a fun part of the evolution.”

The two comedians’ performance styles also evolved over the course of its five seasons. “I was playing the clown more and doing more physical comedy in the beginning of our time together,” Key explained. “And then I found myself evolving into playing more of the straight roles and teeing up Jordan to play the clown.”

The comics worked together on more projects after the show ended — 2016’s Keanu and providing voices for Toy Story 4 and Wendell & Wild — but it’s been a minute since the two appeared on screen with each other. “Our evolution, I think, is tied to both of what our desires are,” Key continued. “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.” 

None of it, though, would have been possible without Key & Peele. “Both of us jumped to another platform,” Key said, “but we needed that first platform.”