Actors On Actors: Dave Chappelle & Mo Amer [Video]

Dave Chappelle makes a rare media appearance to have a conversation with his longtime friend Mo Amer.

He tears up as he praises the second season of ‘Mo’ and it’s “perfect punchline” of a finale.

The two also discuss Chappelle’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ monologues, the time Amer ran into Eric Trump on a plane, and the unexpected timeliness of ‘Mo’.

Dave Chappelle and Mo Amer became close during the pandemic, when Chappelle managed to secure a COVID testing machine and created a bubble at his Ohio home to bring in comedians to perform. Amer was one of them. “We spent all the summer of 2020 together doing shows,” Chappelle says. “The best comedians in the world flew into Ohio, and we had a blast.” 

Those early comedy shows were held in a cornfield, while the comedians were tested every day. But beyond that, Amer was mostly holed up in his Airbnb as he started writing Season 1 of “Mo,” his critically acclaimed Netflix series, which wrapped this year after two seasons.

“It was so nerve-racking because everything was so unsettling,” Amer recalls. “It was COVID; it was civil unrest; it was my own personal stuff. And every one of my writers was juggling things emotionally. It was really overwhelming. But you really saved my life. I’m sure that a lot of people felt that way, because we weren’t working — you gave us an outlet.”

When Amer was invited to participate in Actors on Actors, he suggested Chappelle as a conversation partner. And Chappelle — who hosted “SNL” this year and hasn’t given interviews since he became the subject of controversy for his jokes mocking transgender people in his 2021 Netflix special “The Closer” —  agreed, flying to Los Angeles from Ohio. “As you know, I notoriously don’t like to do press,” Chappelle says. “But I wouldn’t have missed today, because it’s you.”