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Meet the twin filmmakers whose Sundance-approved satire about a religious power couple staging a post-scandal comeback has helped them establish a Hollywood beachhead!<\/p>\n
This fall, the comedy Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. \u2014 starring Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown as Southern Baptist scammers sweating to re-open their megachurch after a public scandal \u2014 will not just herald the ascendance of a fresh new comic filmmaker. It will introduce viewers to two sharp and funny filmmakers, actually: Identical twins Adamma and Adanne Ebo, 31-year-old double Geminis from Atlanta, Georgia, who grew up playing basketball at the same sprawling house of worship where their film was shot. \u201cI\u2019m not sure what double Gemini means,\u201d Adamma says over Zoom from Atlanta, where she\u2019s directing a show created by Donald Glover. \u201cBut people are always like, \u2018Oh, wow.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
As children, Adamma and Adanne attended service two or three times a week. On the other days, they read Harry Potter, which, like Halloween \u2013 \u201cthe devil\u2019s holiday,\u201d Adamma jokes \u2013 was forbidden for promoting magic and evil. \u201cOne of our earliest bouts with really questioning organized religion was we remember the pastor dedicated an entire sermon to the evils of Harry Potter,\u201d Adanne adds from the twins\u2019 home in Inglewood. \u201cEverything that he was saying that was bad or evil about it, it was just very clear to us [that], Oh, he has not read the books \u2014 because none of this shit happens. Magic\u2019s not real. We tried!\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, Adanne met her long-term boyfriend in high school waiting outside a bookstore to buy a hardcover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The elder by 17 minutes, she identifies as a Ravenclaw \u2014 curious, analytical, perfectionist \u2014 while Adamma is a Slytherin, meaning confident, stubborn and loyal. Adamma is also the more lackadaisical twin, both admit. When their Sunday school teacher preached no sex before marriage, it was Adanne who raised her hand and asked what counted as sex.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got in trouble for it!\u201d she yelps. \u201cMake it make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd rarely could people make it make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey discouraged asking questions which was antithetical to how we were raised.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing Christian is a lot,\u201d Adamma says. \u201cThere\u2019s just no possible way you\u2019re going to do everything by the book, so that inherently is going to create some sort of duality in you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Ebos often finish each other\u2019s sentences. Sometimes, they answer in unison. Their clothes and hair coordinate. Even their Instagram posts tend to match, and, on Halloween, their costumes always share a nerdy fangirl theme: Underrated Animated Villains. 1990s Playstation Video Games. Black Faves from Disney Channel Original Movies. Black Heroes on Their Day Off.<\/p>\n
As the daughters of two highly educated Nigerian immigrants (their father is a dentist; their mother has a PhD in molecular biology), they decided in middle school they\u2019d become lawyers. Both enrolled in Spelman, an all-female HBCU, and stuck to their plan up until the day of the LSAT exam, when Adanne glanced over at Adamma\u2019s desk and realized, to her alarm, that she was daydreaming instead of paying attention to the test. During a break, Adanne pulled her sister aside for an emergency reality check.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like, \u2018If you fuck up the test, we\u2019re not going to get into the same school and then we will have to be apart,\u2019\u201d Adanne recalls saying. \u201c\u2019What could you be thinking about right now when you\u2019re supposed to be focusing on our joint future?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The answer was Kiki\u2019s Delivery Service, the 1989 Hayao Miyazaki cartoon about a young witch who loses her powers and plunges into a crisis of self. Adanne listened as her sister rambled seemingly random thoughts about the movie \u2013 \u201cjust, like, word-vomiting all this stuff,\u201d Adamma says \u2013 and when the babbling stopped, Adanne exhaled and told her sister she should go to film school. For the first time in their lives, they split up: Adanne to Northwestern\u2019s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, Adamma to UCLA for an MFA in directing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was traumatic, quite frankly,\u201d Adamma says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sent us both into therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had to learn how to not see each other every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
How many times a day do they need to talk?<\/p>\n
\u201cHow many times?\u201d Adanne asks. \u201cIt\u2019s non-stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cConstantly.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless one of us is asleep or in a meeting. We were literally texting right up until the last moment we hopped on this Zoom.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the (relative) silence, Adamma began to write the script that would become Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul. She put some of her loneliness into the characters of Trinitie and Lee-Curtis Childs, a married couple dealing with fractures in their own partnership as the First Lady and Pastor of the fictional Greater Paths Baptist Church in Atlanta. Preaching has made the Childs rich. (They share an addiction to sequins and Italian leather shoes.) But Lee-Curtis\u2019 sexual misconduct has also made them pariahs in their own community. Worse yet, it may even make them poor, as rival preachers Shakura and Keon Sumpter (Nicole Baharie and Conphidance) hustle to poach their flock.<\/p>\n
The egotistical pair are confident that their 25,000-person congregation believes in divine forgiveness \u2014 or, at least, a dazzling spectacle that includes Praise Mimes, a totally real art-form that is exactly what it sounds. (You can find it on YouTube.) To prove it, the Childs invite a documentary crew to film the weeks leading up to their grand Easter Sunday reopening. And if on her husband\u2019s path to redemption, Trinitie holds his head underwater a little too long during a new baptism, she\u2019s still going to keep grinning for the camera.<\/p>\n
Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. was first filmed as a short, and then expanded into a feature after Adamma\u2019s script was selected for the 2019 Sundance Screenwriting Intensive. Smartly, the Ebos refuse to write off any of their characters as buffoons. Lee-Curtis is a narcissist. Yet, after he pleads his case \u2013 \u201cGod is not in the business of making perfect men,\u201d Brown says, eyes moist with pain \u2013 his wife is convinced that her flawed husband can still do good in this world. Or, as Trinitie finally wails, \u201cWe are doing the best we fucking can! God bless!\u201d (It hits select theaters and starts streaming on Peacock on September 2nd.)<\/p>\n
Adamma knew she loved to write and direct. But she loathed the behind-the-scenes mechanics of actually getting a film made. \u201cYou have to talk to far too many people and look at far too many spreadsheets,\u201d she says. \u201cIt just doesn\u2019t make sense in my brain.\u201d So when Adanne graduated from law school and plunged into her own career crisis, it was her turn to get the hard-sell to go Hollywood and produce her sister\u2019s short films.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I was learning about what producers do, I was like, Oh, this makes a lot of sense for Adanne,\u201d Adamma says. \u201cBasically, we each got each other in the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom our experience, things are way more complex and way messier than people give them credit for,\u201d Adamma says. \u201cIt\u2019s very rarely super clear, or black and white.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why we went down the faux-documentary path,\u201d Adanne adds. \u201cWe wanted to have a conversation about truth, about what is and what isn\u2019t truth. Whats in between the lines of truth. What\u2019s one person\u2019s truth that isn\u2019t another persons truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a conversation we need to have. Nobody talks about this in the Black church,\u201d Adamma continues. \u201cMaybe it\u2019ll be received in the way that we want, which is simply for people to do what we were doing our entire lives: Asking questions, not just being complicit and just taking things at face value.\u201d<\/p>\n
Is that the reaction they\u2019re expecting from their hometown congregation?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve given that to God,\u201d says Adanne. \u201cIt goes over however it goes over.\u201d<\/p>\n
On set, the Ebos gave the cast and crew a cheat-code to tell them apart. Adamma wore her hair in pink braids; Adanne, blue. They aren\u2019t the first identical twin filmmakers \u2013 comedians Kenny and Keith Lucas co-wrote and produced Judas and the Black Messiah \u2013 or even the first identical twin sister filmmakers, thanks to the horror duo Sylvia and Jen Soska, who beat them to that title a decade before. Most sibling duos are brothers, as in the Coens, Weitzes, Russos, Sadfies, etc.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s just a different dynamic, I think, between sisters and brothers?\u201d Adamma muses. \u201cA lot of sisters that I\u2019ve met are like, \u2018Oh, I love my relationship with my sister \u2013 and thus we shall never work together because it will ruin it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Simply joint-helming their own company, Ejime Productions \u2013 meaning \u201ctwins\u201d in Nigerian \u2013 already makes the Ebos a startlingly unusual tag-team. \u201cIt\u2019s intimidating,\u201d Adanne says. \u201cWe get that a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Laughs Adamma, \u201c\u2018One woman, we\u2019ll let it slide. Two? Like, this is a whole lot, guys.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
With a growing list of projects on their slate \u2014 including an animated superhero series starring identical twins \u2014 the industry\u2019s just going to have to adjust.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were born a partnership. We\u2019re going to die a partnership,\u201d Adanne insists.<\/p>\n
Adamma nods: \u201cWe want to be buried next to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
View this article at The Rolling Stone<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Honk for Jesus\u2019: How the Ebo Sisters\u2019 Outrageous Mega-Church Comedy Saved Their Souls: Meet the twin filmmakers whose Sundance-approved satire about a religious power couple staging a post-scandal comeback has helped them establish a Hollywood beachhead! This fall, the comedy Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. \u2014 starring Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown as
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