“We Walked Through the Trenches Together”: ’Duplicity’s RonReaco Lee and Tyler Lepley on Their Decades of Collaboration With Tyler Perry

The intrigue of Tyler Perry’s Duplicity is the twisted journey the multi-hyphenate Tyler Perry brings the audience on. What you may think the story is about is anything but. And it’s all thanks to the ensemble cast leading the mystery thriller. At first, you may think that Kevin and Tony are completely different people, but the deeper you go, the more alike they appear to be. The fascinating characters are brought to life by Tyler Perry staples RonReaco Lee and Tyler Lepley.

As frequent collaborators of Mr. Perry, the pair were veterans on the set of Duplicity. And they warn those future actors to arrive at Mr. Perry’s set: No pranks! But the film they created, they’re eager for audiences to watch. “On the surface, it’s a hell of a thriller,” Tyler Lepley says. “It’s a slow-burning thriller. What you’re seeing is not what meets the eye. There are lots of twists and turns. It’s so juicy, and so much fun. And it’s also satisfying by the time you get to the end.”

Tyler Lepley Discusses the Conversation ‘Duplicity’ Does Not Avoid

With excitement about the film being released, Lepley says, “It’s a long time coming. It felt like we stuck the landing. It was a daunting task to start out with. Very exciting. But we walked through the trenches together, and I felt like we came out on top for sure.” He sums up the film with the single word “deceitful,” while Lee chose “dishonest.”

He continues to say that Duplicity is a film about the search for justice and “trying to get to the bottom of what really happened given a huge incident.” As he puts it, it’s the massive number of layers that the film’s main character, Marley, played by Kat Graham goes through that gives the film its lift. “What she has to sift through to get to the truth,” Lepley says. “In a world full of injustices, there’s a lot of outside noise telling the main character what to believe and what to feel. To watch her feverishly ignore all that and just lock in on what’s right is kind of the spine of the story.”

With the gray area of a black and white world, Lepley adds that bringing that out in this film is in part due to what we’re going through as a culture. “I think the gray area comes in when we don’t judge who these humans are. Everybody’s after something, regardless of what they’re dismissing in the process. I feel like that was the sweet spot, the gray area as you call it, but also the non-judgmental space that we’ve got to look at as actors.”

With the film having real-life inspiration, Lepley says underneath the surface of the film, “The foundation of it is, this is something that continues to plague our community and what we go through on a daily basis. Whether you see it on TV or you don’t, I feel like this kind of conversation is easy to avoid, and it’s something that should never be avoided. To be able to have that type of story be the catalyst, or the introduction into a conversation that is difficult but also still necessary, I feel like that’s the multitude of what I want the audience to take away from it.”

RonReaco Lee Shares the Intrigue of Playing a Cop in Film

While their co-stars Meagan Tandy and Kat Graham were enticed to work with the filmmaker for the first time, Lepley and Lee had that box already checked off. Instead, there were other reasons for their attraction to their parts.

For me, I was really excited to play a police officer on film. I’d done it maybe once on a television show, but to play a police officer and then to, how do I say this, the levels, the layers that came with a character like Kevin, is for an actor, very, very intriguing and exciting to play. Especially in the land of Tyler Perry,” Lee says. “What he gives you, essentially, is the surface to dig in and kind of find your way, using your character as a vehicle. I knew it was going to be a fun ride.”

Collaborating with a mogul like Mr. Perry is part of what excited Lepley about the project. “For me, I think you just hit the nail on the head with that word. Collaboration. Sometimes you’ll have a creator or writer, or director, and they can be a one-track mind. They can be a bit of a dictator, which, if you run into that, you still gotta show up and do what the boss says. [You’ve] got to be professional about it. But when you have someone like Tyler, who knows exactly what he wants, but is also open to what you bring to it as an actor, I feel like that’s the birth of true collaboration. That’s where you capture the magic. The lighting in the bottle.”

As much as they want to have fun while working on a project with a darker theme, RonReaco Lee shares exactly what you don’t want to do while working on Perry’s set: “Pranks and jokes and things that will slow down the day.” It was all about business on the set of Tyler Perry’s Duplicity, but working together has allowed the ensemble cast to find the fun in boosting the film. “We had so much fun promoting this film, so much so that I hope we can all do another film together.”

Tyler Perry’s Duplicity is available to stream on Prime Video.