Tyler Perry shares his life story in new documentary

Tyler Perry is telling his life story in a new documentary.

On Tuesday, Prime Video released the trailer for Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story, which dives into the details of the 54-year-old’s upbringing and path toward his growth into one of the most successful filmmakers of his generation.

The documentary’s trailer opens with a clip from Perry’s 2010 appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes, noting that, at the time, five of Perry’s movies had opened at the top spot at the domestic box office in the four preceding years.

The trailer then dives into how Perry, born Emmitt Perry Jr., changed his name due to his difficult relationship with his father and abusive childhood. Personalities interviewed in the film note that Perry “broke every rule” in Hollywood when he broke out with 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman and 2006’s Madea’s Family Reunion.

The upcoming documentary will also dive into Perry’s relationship with his mother, Willie Maxine Perry, and how her death in 2009 affected him at the height of his success.

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While an official synopsis for the documentary describes Perry as an “entertainment behemoth,” it also notes Perry is “a man working humbly to heal his childhood trauma by transforming his pain into promise.”

According to Prime Video, the documentary — named after his mother — “is a tender and intimate portrait of visionary and innovator Tyler Perry and his harrowing-but-faithful road to the top of an industry that didn’t always include him.”

Directed by Gelila Bekele and Armani Ortiz, the latter of whom has worked with Perry on a number of projects in recent years, the film will take Perry’s fans “into the inner world of a man whose story has never fully been told, as he becomes a father and a media mogul with a mission to pave his own road to the top,” the streamer shared.

Perry has opened up about his difficult childhood and past a number of times over the years. On Oct. 6, he shared a video to Instagram of a 2018 interview. During that conversation, he talked about how he was “devastated, broke, hungry, homeless” at the beginning of his career.

“People would think that’s a failure,” he said at the time. “But it was a setup for the next thing. Everything that I thought was there to make me fail and destroy me was something that made me stronger and better. Failure is a prism; it’s how you look at it.”

Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story debuts Nov. 17 on Prime Video.

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