Michael B. Jordan Production Company Head Alana Mayo on the Future of Hollywood
Oftentimes an aching void in the marketplace is the perfect place to start. Raising Dion, a forthcoming Netflix series about a young boy with superpowers, is Outlier’s response to Black Panther. “There are so few science-fiction films or TV shows that have people of color as the star. And not in a way where it is the usual paradigm and you’re just casting it differently, but where you’re actually embracing other people and their culture,” Mayo says. “Whoopi Goldberg talked about how [growing up] she never saw black people in the future in film and television. As a child she was like, ‘What happens to us?'"
From an early age Mayo struggled to answer that question for herself. A child of the eighties, she never identified with era classics like Sixteen Candles. “I’m from Chicago, so I should be like, ‘Oh, John Hughes,’ but I did not relate to that movie at all,” she says. “I grew up identifying as an outsider. I had these weird, potentially contradictory parts of my identity.” Mayo’s mom, Maisha, is a Jehovah’s Witness who worked in entertainment law. Her dad, Barry, is a meditation enthusiast and retired radio executive who helped launch New York’s WRKS-FM. “To grow up with weird, idiosyncratic people who did not look at that as a deficit allowed me and my brothers to embrace doing things differently,” she says. “Like, ‘Yeah, we are black kids raised in Chicago in this devout Christian religion, but also we’re all of these other things. And all of these things can exist as a whole.’ I was lucky to grow up that way. I think it very directly led me to what I’m doing professionally now."
Back at Skydance, Mayo and company stand out among the framed Tom Cruise posters and comically oversize movie props. Her assistant, Christina (employee number three), a recent Columbia University grad with bleached-out blue hair and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of film, keeps answering her cell phone, “Alana Mayo’s office!” At one point during our photo shoot, a female Skydance executive in slacks and a button-down hovers in a door frame. “I’m loving this. I’m texting Lena,” she teases, referring to Mayo’s fiancée, Lena Waithe, Emmy-winning writer and the creator of The Chi. Mayo lets out a laugh—“I’m never going to live this one down, am I?” she says—but continues to clack away on her laptop as a hairstylist sets the edges on her braids.
Later, while drinking her second coffee of the morning, she talks about her experience of being black in white spaces. “This is how we dress. This is how I wear my hair. And I think it is really, really cool for people like us to occupy these spaces because one feeds the other.... We’re finally at a place where I feel like ‘the system’ is excited by young people coming in with a different point of view,” she says. “To be able to work alongside a company like this”—she gestures around Skydance—“means a big-budget, all-audience movie is possible. It allows us to feel emboldened to change and experiment.”
In other words, it allows Outlier to change the industry from the inside out, something that hasn’t always been possible. “My office was always filled with people of color and gays and women. And for that, I was ostracized,” says Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels, for whom Mayo interned while in college at Columbia University. “That Alana is being embraced for it makes my heart swell.” When I ask Mayo whether she identifies as a disruptor, her eyes light up. “I love that word,” she says. “I love disruptor. I love innovation. I’m a contrarian by nature, so anything that is about fucking with the status quo is very exciting to me. I would love to think of this company, and everybody who works at it, as a disruptor."
