\n<\/p>\n
In 2006, Matthew A. Cherry was a wide receiver struggling to get playing time in the N.F.L., bouncing between teams and getting signed and cut again and again.<\/p>\n
After injuring his shoulder and being placed on reserve for the Baltimore Ravens, he was ready to move on. Using the Hollywood Creative Directory, he looked up three Black showrunners in Los Angeles and mailed letters to each of them asking for a job.<\/p>\n
Then, he packed his bags and drove to Hollywood to pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker.<\/p>\n
Sixteen years later, Cherry has worked his way from production assistant to successful writer-director. In 2020, he won an Oscar for \u201cHair Love,\u201d an animated short about a Black father who struggles to style his daughter\u2019s hair while her mother is hospitalized. Now, he has an animated sequel series on Max, \u201cYoung Love,\u201d which follows the same young Black family in Chicago; it premiered on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Although Cherry feels that he has finally made it in the industry, he still seems a little surprised at how he got here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cMy whole career I\u2019ve been going in through back doors and building doors where there are no doorways,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
On a recent Thursday, Cherry ambled through Central Park on a break between TV interviews about \u201cYoung Love.\u201d He is tall and athletic, but he is also a nerd, gushing about seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda in the audience at Shakespeare in the Park and rattling off the names of filmmakers he admires.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Born to a mother who worked as a legal secretary and a father who worked in a factory, Cherry grew up in Albany Park on the northwest side of Chicago. He and his sister would often visit their grandmother and eat home-cooked fried chicken and mac and cheese in her big brownstone in a mostly Black neighborhood on the West Side, where \u201cYoung Love\u201d is set. He took an early interest in sports, but he also became fascinated with music and movies, starting with obsessively rewatching a Winnie the Pooh movie.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe rented it so many times from the video store that the owner just gave it to us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In high school at Loyola Academy, a private school in a northern suburb, he participated in a radio and TV club and was one of five Black graduates in a class of 500. He was also good at football \u2014 very good \u2014 and earned a full-ride scholarship to play at the University of Akron, in Ohio. While there, he nourished his twin passions for sports and entertainment, studying radio and TV broadcast and media production and becoming a music director of the college radio station.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Nick Sparks, Cherry\u2019s college roommate and former teammate, remembers him being a \u201ctall skinny wide receiver from Chicago\u201d who was always on the go, networking with people in the entertainment world or holed up in the campus radio studio.<\/p>\n
Cherry lit up the field in Akron. He set a school record for most yards on punt returns in a season and was named Second-Team All-Mid-American Conference in 2003. Suddenly the N.F.L. seemed within reach. He joined the Jacksonville Jaguars as an undrafted free agent in 2004.<\/p>\n
His N.F.L. career, unfortunately, \u201cwas not your typical millionaire story,\u201d he said. Over the next few years, he was shuffled around the league and played in nine cities and two other countries, trying to land a long-term spot on a roster. But even as he struggled in the league, he continued to keep up with the entertainment world.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe always had the latest music and latest videos,\u201d said Chris Thompson, a running back and Cherry\u2019s former teammate on the Jaguars. \u201cHe was one of the first guys to put me on to Kanye West.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
By 2007, frustrated by how his peers were advancing in the league while he stagnated, Cherry retired from the N.F.L. and decided to pursue his other longtime dream, to work in entertainment. He relocated to the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, crashing on a friend\u2019s couch while looking for work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
With the help of Streetlights, a nonprofit that helps people of color get jobs as production assistants, he landed his first job as a production assistant for \u201cGirlfriends\u201d and later worked on NBC\u2019s \u201cHeroes.\u201d At the same time, he would search Myspace and message R&B artists offering to make music videos for them. He didn\u2019t own recording equipment, so he got permission to borrow cameras from the \u201cHeroes\u201d set for his own music videos.<\/p>\n
In 2008, he directed his first video for an R&B artist named Terry Dexter, and he eventually directed videos for Jazmine Sullivan, Snoop Dogg and others, sometimes making only $100 a day. He also directed TV episodes and scripted shorts, and he wrote and directed two feature films: \u201cLast Fall\u201d (2012), about an N.F.L. player struggling with life after football, and \u201c9 Rides\u201d (2016) which was shot on an iPhone 6s.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s not traditionally trained as a filmmaker,\u201d said Monica A. Young, who has worked as a producer for Cherry on many of his projects. \u201cHe learned on the job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then Young, who had been producing for Cherry since 2008, got an interesting call from him in the fall of 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey Mon, I have an idea,\u201d she recalls him saying. \u201cIf we do it right, we can win an Oscar.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cherry\u2019s idea was to create an animated short about a young Black girl\u2019s hair. At the time, the animated film space was still dominated by mostly white characters, and he wanted Black kids to be just as well-represented.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy whole life I never really had those characters that I could look at onscreen and say, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s me,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
What resulted, \u201cHair Love,\u201d which Cherry wrote and co-directed, was a resounding success; in addition to its Oscar, it became the basis for a best-selling children\u2019s book and the inspiration for a line of Dove Kids hair products.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
With \u201cYoung Love,\u201d Cherry wanted partly to showcase the parts of Chicago \u2014 and the people \u2014 that viewers don\u2019t normally see onscreen. The show picks up after the events of \u201cHair Love,\u201d with Angela (voiced by Issa Rae) out of the hospital and Stephen (Kid Cudi) working to succeed as a music producer. Together, they raise their daughter, Zuri (Brooke Monroe Conaway), and deal with the challenges of paying rent, parenting and managing their careers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never really seen a family show that centers on millennial parents, young parents that have tattoos and dealing with health issues and lack of insurance and all the things that we are dealing with today,\u201d he said. \u201cWe really wanted them to represent a new age of parenting.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Cherry, the show is also about showing a Black man onscreen who isn\u2019t an absent father, who is deeply involved in his daughter\u2019s life \u2014 the kind of man Cherry wants to be for his 11-month-old daughter, Theory. (Cherry met his wife, Candice, who works as the head of film at Kevin Hart\u2019s production company, at the American Black Film Festival in Miami in 2016.)<\/p>\n
He recently showed the trailer for \u201cYoung Love\u201d to Theory, and he said she likes gazing at the \u201cHair Love\u201d picture book, even though she is too young to read.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019ll be there holding the pages, flipping through them,\u201d he said. Sometimes, he\u2019ll pull out his phone and take a photo \u2014 a memory of young love preserved for the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n