While working on hit show, Donald Glover battled ‘impostor syndrome’

The Emmy winner’s insecurities around his status as a diversity hire on NBC’s “30 Rock” contributed to his “stress dreams.”

Emmy-winner Donald Glover says he suffered from impostor syndrome after landing his first writing gig in 2016 on the NBC comedy, “30 Rock.”

At the time, series creator Tina Fey told Glover that he was a diversity hire, the actor revealed in a recent GQ interview.

“There is no animosity between us or anything like that, but [Tina Fey] said it herself … It was a diversity thing,” Glover said.

Glover said this revelation caused him to suffer from impostor syndrome early in his career. According to Psychology Today, the condition exists when a person feels “undeserving of their achievements.”

Glover said, “It definitely didn’t feel like I was supposed to be there,” he said of his time at “30 Rock,” which aired from 2006 to 2013.

Tracy Morgan, one of the show’s stars, praised Glover’s skills despite the writer’s anxieties. “When I first read his writing during ’30 Rock,’ I was like, ‘He’s got it’,” Morgan told GQ. “The things he wrote for me made me very funny.”

After the show ended, Glover later learned that he and “Blackish” creator Kenya Barris were up for the same position in Fey’s writer’s room. “I didn’t know it was between me and him until later, Glover said. “He hit me one day and he was like, ‘I hated you for years’!” 

Glover said his insecurities around his status as a diversity hire contributed to bad dreams. “I used to have stress dreams every night where I was doing cartwheels on the top of a New York skyscraper with the other writers watching me,” he recalled. 

Speaking about the diversity initiative in a 2018 interview with The New Yorker, Glover noted that he often questioned exactly why he got the job. “I wondered, ‘Am I being hired just because I’m black’?” 

Since then, he has gone on to have a successful acting and music career. In addition to releasing four studio albums, he has won five Grammy awards under the rap alias, Childish Gambino. He has also earned two Emmys and a Golden Globe for his hit drama series, “Atlanta.”

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