Donald Glover

• 1. Introduction

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  Donald McKinley Glover Jr. was voted "Most Likely to Write for The Simpsons" in his high school yearbook at Stephenson High School in Stone Mountain, Georgia. At age 23, that prediction came close to true. He walked into a room of seasoned television executives at 30 Rock, shocked they had hired him. He had sent writing samples to producer David Miner, including a spec script for The Simpsons, and Tina Fey was impressed enough to bring him aboard. What followed was a career that refused to stay in one lane. The same person who wrote NBC sitcom dialogue would go on to debut a number-one rap single on Saturday Night Live, win a Grammy for Record of the Year, direct landmark television in Atlanta, and voice Simba in a film that grossed more than a billion dollars. How does one person occupy so many distinct creative spaces simultaneously? And what does it cost? The story of Donald Glover is also the story of a man who, more than once, walked away from the thing that was working.

• 2. From Tisch to 30 Rock

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  In 2006, Glover graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a degree in dramatic writing. While still a student, he had been part of Derrick Comedy, a sketch group that posted videos to YouTube from 2006 onward alongside Dominic Dierkes, Meggie McFadden, DC Pierson, and Dan Eckman. That group would go on to write and star in Mystery Team, a feature-length comedy about amateur teenage detectives that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009.

  At 30 Rock, Glover wrote from 2006 to 2009 and made occasional on-screen appearances. He and his co-writers received the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy Series in 2008 for the show's third season. In 2008, he auditioned unsuccessfully to play Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live; the role went to Fred Armisen. He received the Rising Comedy Star award at the Just for Laughs festival in July 2010, and appeared in Gap's holiday advertising campaign that same year. These early years established two things: Glover's writing could hold its own in professional television rooms, and performing was pulling at him just as hard.

• 3. Community and the Spider-Man Campaign

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  Community premiered in September 2009 on NBC, with Glover playing Troy Barnes, a former high school jock navigating a community college alongside Dan Harmon's ensemble cast. He stayed as a full-time cast member through the fourth season, then appeared in only the first five episodes of season five. Hand-written notes he posted to Instagram explained that the departure was personal. He needed projects that gave him more independence as he worked through things privately. Harmon asked him to return for season six, and Glover declined, feeling that coming back would not serve the show, the audience, or himself.

  In May 2010, a fan started the Twitter hashtag "#donald4spiderman", pushing for Glover to audition for the lead role in The Amazing Spider-Man. The campaign went viral, and Spider-Man creator Stan Lee voiced support. Sony never contacted Glover, and the role went to Andrew Garfield. Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis later said he had already conceived Miles Morales, an African-American version of Spider-Man, before the campaign took off. Still, Bendis credited Glover with influencing the new character's look, specifically citing a moment from Community where Glover wore the costume: "I saw him in the costume and thought, 'I would like to read that book.'" Glover later voiced that version of Spider-Man on the Ultimate Spider-Man animated series, and in 2017 played Aaron Davis, Miles Morales's uncle, in Spider-Man: Homecoming, with director Jon Watts calling the casting "a surprise treat for fans."

• 4. Atlanta and a New Kind of Television

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  In 2013, Glover signed a deal with FX to develop a music-themed show. He chose FX specifically because the network was willing to work around his touring schedule, even though other networks had expressed interest. The series, Atlanta, was formally ordered in December 2014. FX announced a ten-episode first season in October 2015, and it premiered on the 6th of September 2016, to widespread critical acclaim. Glover writes, occasionally directs, executive produces, and stars in it as Earnest "Earn" Marks, a Princeton dropout managing his rapper cousin through the Atlanta hip hop scene.

  For the show, Glover won two Golden Globe Awards: Best Television Series in the Musical or Comedy category, and Best Actor in that same category. He became the fifth Black person in Golden Globe history to win as Best Actor in that field. He also won two Primetime Emmy Awards, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series and for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series, making him the first Black person to win an Emmy for directing a comedy. FX signed him to an exclusive overall deal after the first season's success. A planned animated Deadpool series set for 2018 was later canceled over creative differences; Glover posted an unproduced script to Twitter to put the media speculation to rest. Atlanta ran through 2022, with both seasons 3 and 4 completing filming in early 2022 before premiering that year.

• 5. Childish Gambino, Reluctantly

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  Glover's stage name came from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator. His first independent mixtape, Sick Boi, appeared in June 2008. A string of further mixtapes followed through 2010. For his 2011 debut studio album Camp, he approached Community score composer Ludwig Göransson for production help; Göransson became his most frequent musical collaborator. Camp debuted at number eleven on the Billboard 200, selling 52,000 copies in its first week. PopMatters writer Steve Lepore called it "undoubtedly one of the best records of any genre to come out in 2011."

  His second studio album, Because the Internet, was released in December 2013 and debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200. To promote it, Glover wrote and starred in a short film called Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, directed by Hiro Murai, and also released a 72-page screenplay designed to sync with the album. The album's single "Heartbeat" was RIAA-certified Gold after shipping 500,000 copies in June 2014. At the 57th Grammy Awards, he received his first nominations for Best Rap Album and Best Rap Performance.

  The third album, "Awaken, My Love!", debuted in December 2016 and reached number five on the Billboard 200, later receiving platinum certification for accumulating one million certified units. It was a sharp stylistic turn, drawing on psychedelic soul, funk, and R&B rather than hip hop, with Funkadelic as a clear touchstone. The single "Redbone" peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional R&B Performance. Glover had debuted the album's songs at three performances he called the "Pharos Experience", held in Joshua Tree, California, in September 2016. The vinyl release came with a virtual reality headset and an app granting access to those performances.

• 6. "This Is America" and What It Won

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  At Governors Ball Music Festival in June 2017, Glover told the audience, "I'll see you for the last Gambino album," then walked off stage. He later elaborated in an interview, saying his musical career no longer felt "necessary" and comparing an unwarranted return to "a third sequel."

  Instead, in January 2018, he signed with RCA Records, calling it "a necessary change of pace." In May 2018, while hosting and serving as musical guest on Saturday Night Live, he released the single "This Is America." It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, his first number-one and top-ten entry in the United States. The song's lyrics addressed gun violence and the experience of being Black in America. The music video, directed by Hiro Murai, depicted Glover with a firearm shooting at a choir and became immediately controversial. At the 61st Grammy Awards, "This Is America" won in all four categories for which it was nominated: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Rap/Sung Performance, and Best Music Video. It also earned a Guinness World Record as the first hip hop song to win Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

  Glover launched the This Is America Tour in September 2018, announcing at its opening show in Atlanta that it would be his last tour. In April 2019, days after headlining Coachella, he premiered a new song called "Algorythm" through the augmented reality app Pharos AR. At the 2019 Outside Lands Music Festival, he drew what was described as the biggest crowd the festival had ever seen, and announced it was "the second to last show that we'll be doing" before retiring the Childish Gambino name.

• 7. Film Roles and Guava Island

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  Three films arrived for Glover in 2015 alone. In The Lazarus Effect he played a scientist caught in a resurrection experiment gone wrong. In Magic Mike XXL he played a singer and performed a cover of Bruno Mars's "Marry You," which was included on the soundtrack. In Ridley Scott's The Martian, he played Rich Purnell, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory astrodynamicist who devises a plan to rescue Matt Damon's astronaut stranded on Mars.

  In 2018, while filming the second season of Atlanta, Glover played a young Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story, missing some episode appearances in the process. Lando had previously been played by Billy Dee Williams in the original trilogy. Despite the film's difficult production and weak box office performance, Glover's work was praised, with critic Stephanie Zacharek singling out his "unruly, charismatic elegance."

  Guava Island came together in an unusual way. In February 2018, Glover approached New Regency without a script, simply proposing a project he wanted to make while between Solo promotional duties and his upcoming tour. On the strength of his track record, they agreed quickly, and Amazon Studios signed on to distribute. The film, written by his brother Stephen and directed by Hiro Murai, was shot in Cuba. Glover plays a musician who organizes a festival on his home island, with Rihanna co-starring as his partner. It premiered at Coachella in 2019 and was released through Amazon Prime Video to generally favorable reviews. The Lion King followed later that year: Glover voiced adult Simba in the remake of the 1994 Disney film, and asked director Jon Favreau to let him re-record his lines after connecting more deeply to the story following his father's death in December 2018. The film grossed 1.6 billion dollars worldwide.

• 8. Private Life and What Comes Next

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  Glover began dating Michelle White in 2015 and married her in January 2024, going directly to the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith from the wedding. They have three sons, born in early 2016, 2018, and 2020. He has described social media as making him feel "less human," telling The New Yorker that he only visits online spaces where he can remain anonymous and communicate with people who understand what he is saying.

  In October 2024, Glover announced on Twitter that he was canceling the remaining shows on The New World Tour after experiencing a stroke following a concert in New Orleans. Surgery to repair a hole in his heart followed. He made his first public performance since then at Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival in November 2025. In an April 2024 interview tied to the release of Atavista, a reworked version of 3.15.20, he explained that retiring the Childish Gambino name came down to logistics: balancing album-making with film, television, and family obligations alongside running his creative company Gilga had become unworkable. He released Bando Stone and the New World in July 2024 as the stated final Childish Gambino album. Glover and his brother Stephen were announced in July 2023 as the head writers of the Star Wars series Lando, replacing Justin Simien.