Early life
Ridley was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, [3] and was raised from the age of seven in Mequon, Wisconsin, [4] [5] with an ophthalmologist father, John Ridley, III, and a mother, Terry Ridley, who was a special education teacher [1] for Milwaukee Public Schools. [4] [6] He has two sisters and is the middle sibling. [4]
Ridley graduated from Homestead High School in Mequon, Wisconsin in 1982. [4] He enrolled in Indiana University but transferred to New York University. [4] There, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in East Asian languages. The subject wasn't applicable to his career, but it sparked his intellectual interests. [7] Ridley is Christian. [8]
Career
Following college, Ridley spent a year living and traveling in Japan. [7] Then, he returned to New York and began performing standup comedy in New York City, and he made appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson . [4] Moving to Los Angeles in 1990, he began writing for such television sitcoms as Martin , The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , and The John Larroquette Show . [4] After both writing and directing his film debut, the 1997 crime thriller Cold Around the Heart , he and Oliver Stone co-adapted Ridley's first novel, Stray Dogs (still unpublished when Stone bought the rights [9] ) into the 1997 Stone-directed film U Turn , which was released slightly earlier than Cold Around the Heart. Ridley went on to write the novels Love Is a Racket and Everybody Smokes in Hell. His novel Spoils of War was adapted into the 1999 David O. Russell-directed Three Kings . Ridley's original script was rewritten by Russell and Ridley, with Ridley receiving a "story by" credit negotiated among himself, Russell, and the releasing studio, Warner Bros. [9] Ridley then became a writer and a supervising producer on the NBC crime drama Third Watch . His other novels are The Drift, Those Who Walk in Darkness , and A Conversation with the Mann. [4] He also wrote the graphic novel The American Way . [10] [11]
From 2000 to 2010, he was a commentator and blogger for NPR. [12] His blog was Visible Man, a play on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . [13] In 2003, Ridley inked a one-year overall deal with Universal Network Television. [14]
His work as screenwriter also includes 12 Years a Slave , [15] Red Tails , and Undercover Brother. His script for 12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, [16] making Ridley the second African American to win the award, after Geoffrey S. Fletcher (for Precious , based on the novel Push by Sapphire). [15] [17]
In April 2015, Ridley was developing an ABC television series involving an existing Marvel Comics character. [18] However, by December 2019, the project was cancelled due to Marvel Television folding into Marvel Studios. [19] Ridley later revealed that his cancelled project would have been a version of Eternals , which was instead developed as an unrelated movie directed by Chloé Zhao. [20]
On April 16, 2018, it was announced that Ridley would direct and write an adaptation of his graphic novel The American Way produced by Blumhouse Productions. [21]
On June 4, 2018, it was announced that Ridley would direct a feature film adaptation of the Robert Silverberg short story, Needle in a Timestack produced by Bron Studios. The film featured performances from Leslie Odom Jr., Freida Pinto, Cynthia Erivo, and Orlando Bloom. [22]
In 2021, Ridley began writing a number of series for DC Comics. The series include a new Batman series 'The Next Batman' as part of the company's line-wide event 'Future State', and a 5-issue series 'The Other History of the DC Universe' a text-based story about the history of the non-white, non-American DC heroes such as Black Lightning and Katana.
In May 2021, Marvel Comics announced that Ridley will write Black Panther comics. [23]
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