Ask Tyler Perry how many times he’s visited the White House, and he has to pause to count. “Let me think: One, two, three—I think I’ve been there four times,” he says. “One of the best was at a dinner we had in the president’s private quarters. There were about five of us, and at the end of the night we were all sitting out on the Truman Balcony—man, that was something.” He chuckles. “That was the Obama White House,” he says, leaning into the name for emphasis.
Perry hasn’t been to the executive mansion lately, but the actor/writer/director/producer best known as the man behind dyspeptic granny Madea now has a White House of his very own. Specifically, a three-story, stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, built to 80 percent scale, which he erected as a set for his new BET drama, The Oval. The columns are load-bearing, the toilets flush, and every floor is wheelchair accessible. And the craziest part? “We built it in about 12 weeks!” he crows.
The faux White House is just the feather in the cap of the entertainment mogul’s most impressive enterprise to date: his 330-acre Tyler Perry Studios, which recently celebrated its grand opening. Built on the grounds of Fort McPherson, a former military base in Atlanta that Perry purchased in 2015, it is one of the largest production facilities in the country. There are 12 state-of-the-art soundstages (each named after an African American trailblazer in the entertainment industry), 200 acres of green space, and a dazzling back lot of sets that, in addition to the presidential manse, includes a bank, county jail, lakeside cabin, trailer park, suburban homes, and a commercial jet—all camera-ready. (The Walking Dead has already filmed several seasons here.) The grounds also include 40 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, ideal for any production in need of, say, a beautifully restored Victorian house. (FDR used to stay there when visiting the base; more recently it served as a location for Boo 2! A Madea Halloween.)
“Most production companies use soundstages,” says Paul Wonsek, who’s been Perry’s go-to production designer for the last eight years and worked on most of the studio buildings. “But Tyler builds real architectural structures for shooting. Nobody else works this way.”
“At heart, I’m a frustrated builder,” says Perry. “I think I would have been an architect if I hadn’t gone into entertainment.” Growing up in New Orleans, where he struggled through a childhood marked by physical and sexual abuse, he discovered that he could find comfort in the act of building physical shelter. A play fort beneath the porch of his family’s home was the first space he ever built for himself. “It had a concrete floor, and there were terrible mosquitoes,” he recalls. “But I painted it a robin’s-egg blue and stapled pictures to the walls.” The cramped cubbyhole, he says, was “a place where I could dream.” He would also often accompany his father to his job working in construction. “I learned how to do everything, from drilling concrete nails to putting in floor joists,” he says. The sense of possibility inherent in the work captivated him. “I loved seeing floor plans and thinking about how to improve them,” he says. “I started sketching out designs, and sometimes I’d get paid $10, $15, or $20 for a drawing.”
That love of designing and building has never left him. And Perry has indulged in this passion with the extravagance only a self-made multimillionaire who once lived out of his car can muster. “For the last 15 years I’ve always had two or three personal projects in construction,” he says. Among his properties are a French château–inspired mansion in Atlanta, a Tuscan-style estate in Beverly Hills, a log cabin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and his own 25-acre, previously uninhabited island in the Bahamas, each house designed to his personal vision. “There was nothing there when I bought it,” he says of the Exumas property. “I had to bring in the water and electricity—even my own palm trees from Miami.”
Back in Atlanta, where Tyler Perry Studios is fully up and running, the multitasking mogul says he’s not even close to finished. After all, he still has those 200 acres of green space to work with. “I’m looking into creating a six-lane highway,” he says. And maybe even his own charming European-style city. “You know, something with winding cobblestone streets? We could use it for Paris.”