Chris Rock is having a phenomenal year. Yes, that’s in thanks partially to his latest directorial effort, Misty Green, premiering at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival to strong reviews, and partially to filming Grown Ups 3 with his longtime friends, but mostly it’s thanks to the New York Knicks winning the NBA championship.
“[Misty Green] could die a miserable death, and the fact the Knicks won out, I’d still be like, ‘Oh, what a great year!’” he joked on Sunday afternoon at the beginning of an hourlong retrospective. It’s certainly a great year to be a New Yorker.
Only hours after Misty Green’s world premiere at Toronto’s Roy Thompson Hall, Rock took part in the festival’s In Conversation With… series at the TIFF Lightbox theater. He discussed career highlights, from his early days as a stand-up comedian in New York and his tenure on Saturday Night Live through his breakthrough 2009 documentary Good Hair and the creation of Misty Green.
While Rock may have spent most of his life in New York, his latest film is a portrait of Hollywood through the lens of fictional Emmy-winning actress Misty Green. Slow Horses star Rosalind Eleazar stars as the titular lead, a fading actress struggling to regain fame, with Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick, Topher Grace, and Rock himself in supporting roles.
Here are seven things we learned about Chris Rock from the conversation.
Chris Rock wanted to be president
While discussing his 2003 directorial debut, Head of State, in which his character unexpectedly becomes commander in chief, Rock shared that he harbored grand political aspirations when he was young.
“This sounds so egotistical, but I really wanted to be the president of the United States,” he said. “I told my mother that, and she said, ‘No, you’re going to get shot.’ I took that to heart, and now I do this.”
“I could have been the president,” he continued. “I know that sounds crazy, but my theory is it’s harder to be Tom Cruise than it is to be the president, because there doesn’t have to be a Tom Cruise. There’s no system designed so that every four years we’re going to have a Tom Cruise.”
He backed up this information by citing the several times he’s stayed at the same hotel as an ex-president. “When the president’s the president, it’s this crazy motorcade and Secret Service. When they’re not the president, they have one Secret Service guy. Kevin Hart has so much more security than [Barack] Obama right now.”
He owes directing career to Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy
Rock shared that he’d been eyeing the director chair for years before Head of State allowed him to helm a film. That’s due partially to a run-in with Oscar-winning director Spike Lee.
“Early in my stand-up career, I met Eddie Murphy at a club, and I was basically part of the entourage,” he shared. “One night we went to see [Spike Lee’s 1989 film] She’s Gotta Have It. Spike was outside the theater selling shirts and talking to Eddie. I was like the kid in A Bronx Tale. I got to hang around the gangsters and watch how they worked. He wrote the movie. He directed the movie. This guy looked like me. He was wearing sneakers. I was like, ‘Note to self: Maybe I can do something like that.’”
Why directing a new doc would be a challenge
In 2009, Good Hair, Rock’s documentary on the hair of Black women, earned rave reviews and a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. While Rock would love to direct another documentary, he told Bailey that Good Hair came about largely thanks to former HBO executive Chris Albrecht.
“For whatever reason, Chris Albrecht just loved him some Chris Rock,” Rock said. “When my dad died, Chris gave me a holding deal just to put money in my pocket. The guy made a bet on me very early.” Rock would go on to not only air five stand-up specials on HBO, but also host a late-night talk show, The Chris Rock Show, there from 1997 to 2000.
“When he was leaving, one of the last things he greenlit was Good Hair,” Rock continued. “He was just like, ‘What do you need?’ ‘I need a million dollars.’ [He said,] ‘OK.’”
While Rock admitted those were special circumstances, he also said that in his more recent meetings about directing documentaries, executives have wanted to know too much up front. “Every time I go pitch a documentary, they want the whole thing done, and they want to know exactly what the ending is,” Rock said. “It’s a philosophical thing. I just don’t believe in making a documentary like that. I believe a documentary is an investigation. I’ve walked away from a couple deals because they’re trying to make you guarantee what it’s going to be right away.”
Rock was jealous of Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler
While Chris Rock is in many ways just as famous as Eddie Murphy or Adam Sandler, he let their fame stymie him when he was younger. “I was chasing Eddie. I was chasing Adam,” he said, sharing that he attempted to make movies in the same vein as the pair of comedians, even if those weren’t the types of movies that interested him.
“Head of State is almost a Sandler movie. You know what I mean?” Rock said. “Because of the broadness of it. I had to just give all of that up. I like Woody Allen. I like Mike Leigh. I had to basically come out of the closet as a guy that loved art movies, not be ashamed of it, and just embrace it. I had to make the kind of movie that I would go see and stop thinking about the box office.” That’s what eventually led to his 2014 film Top Five.
He wrote Top Five on the set of Grown Ups 2
Perhaps the set of a broad Adam Sandler comedy might not seem to be the most conducive place to write an art film, but that’s what Chris Rock did.
“Being number three or four on the call sheet of a ginormous movie means you’re going to have a lot of days off,” Rock said. “So what am I going to do with this time? I wrote the movie.”
Rock also credits part of Top Five’s success to disgraced producer Scott Rudin. “Scott produced it, and he really pushed me,” Rock said. “I know people have whatever stories about Scott. I need hard coaching. Everybody doesn’t respond to a hug. I know that’s not for everybody, but for me, I prefer a general. Scott really pushed me in a way I hadn’t been pushed in a long time.”
Rock also cites Tracy Morgan as the inspiration for the film’s name. “It’s literally an ad lib from Tracy Morgan,” Rock says about the film’s titular question as to who your top five rappers are. “He ad-libs it in the scene inside the projects, and then we went back and reshot some other stuff and kept adding it.”
He used to talk about his comedy sets with Prince
Another of Chris Rock’s inspirations/mentors was the late musician.
“I remember talking to Prince, and yep, I just dropped a name,” Rock said to laughs from the audience. Rock said that Prince would watch his stand-up sets and they’d talk after.
“We would break down the jokes as if they were songs,” he said. “A good joke has a chorus you come back to. It has a verse, and sometimes it even has a bridge. We’re all writing music. We just write it in a different way. Spike Lee’s music is on film. Maya Angelou’s music is in a book. We all have these themes we come back to.”
He wrote Misty Green to show dearth of Black women roles
Misty Green focuses on the plight of an aging Black actress in Hollywood, desperately trying to relaunch her career, something Rock knows is often nearly impossible. During the talk, he told a story about how earlier in his career, he’d see budget allotment sheets from studios, which would show the pay range scales for different demographic groups.
“The lowest was always Black women. It was the lowest pay scale,” Rock said. “Whenever one of my friends is having a hard time casting a part, I always say, ‘Get a Black woman. You can get the most famous one you want. She’s probably available.’ There’s a much better chance of her being available than chasing this white boy for a part.”
