People like Donald Glover aren’t supposed to exist; shows like Atlanta aren’t supposed to get made. And yet here we are, in 2018, witnessing Glover and Atlanta happen at the same time. Looking back now, it’s hard to imagine the pitch — a show about a Princeton dropout who wants to be a rap manager? — although of course Glover remembers, because going from idea to episode one took years.

“We shopped it around to all these places,” Glover told me. “I didn’t get too specific about what the show was, because I just felt like trying to explain it was going to be a hard sell.” And it was. Numerous networks passed; in the end, FX was the only one that didn’t blink. “It was a Trojan Horse to be able to just tell stories,” Glover said. “I’m just not a person who wants to give people what they want, because I’m more complicated than that.”

Now no one in Hollywood can get enough of Donald Glover or Atlanta. The show that everyone rejected is the one everyone invokes to get their ideas greenlit, a show that is shorthand for once-in-a-generation originality. Glover told me a story about someone who had recently pitched a show. The network’s idea: “Is there a way to make this into the Mexican Atlanta?” he said. “Which I guess on a certain level is flattering.” But a hit doesn’t become a hit based on what it’s made of; the sum has to be greater than its parts. “It’s not an A-to-B-type thing,” Glover said. A show has to be its own thing.

At 34, Glover has made a career of frustrating people’s expectations of him. After Atlanta’s debut season, Glover earned a pair of Emmys and a twin set of Golden Globes — the former making him the first African-American to win for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series. He’s more successful than anybody his age has any right to be, and it’s because of his creative energy and curiosity.

“I’m way farther up this never-ending mountain than I thought I would ever be,” he told me. “Not that I thought that I’d never be there.”

Last December, I met Glover in Atlanta. He was in a meditative mood. Or maybe he was just tired, having wrapped the second season of Atlanta only a few days before. Whatever the case, there was a stillness about him that was a little eerie. It turns out Glover was thinking about the weight of his crown. “Fame definitely doesn’t help me do what I want to do,” he said as we took our seats in the back of a black SUV. That might be because he wears its trappings lightly.

Maybe you know him as the wonderfully cracked voice behind Tracy Morgan’s “Tracy Jordan” on 30 Rock, or as Troy Barnes, the sweet, washed-up quarterback from another smart sitcom, less seen in the UK, Community. Perhaps you were introduced to him as Childish Gambino, the musician who managed to coax a serious career out of a collegiate dalliance with a Wu-Tang Clan name generator, or you watched his stand-up specials. Or maybe you first saw him as Earn Marks, the lost boy who’s trying to support his daughter, in Atlanta. Maybe you hadn’t heard of him until he broke the internet in May, with his single 'This is America', and the startling video that came with it. Possibly you first laid eyes on him that same month, when he stole all his scenes as Lando Calrissian in Solo: a Star Wars Story. Perhaps you stumbled on Atlanta’s second series, Robbin’ Season, which first aired here on the Fox TV channel in June. Spring/summer 2018 belonged to Donald Glover.

Glover, aka Childish Gambino, in his video for ’This is America’, which received universal acclaim and has clocked up over 300 million YouTube views RUBA

"Part of the reason I do what I do is because I’m the only one who can do it."

As Troy in Community, as Childish Gambino, as Earn in Atlanta, as Lando Calrissian — and in movies like The Martian and Magic Mike XXL — Glover is hugely compelling. His acting is very physical: he has that ability to fill the space he’s given onscreen, even when he’s playing for laughs. The shape of his career, wending as it does across television, music and movies, feels like something very new, or perhaps very old: he’s the sort of cross-genre talent rarely seen since Hollywood’s studio days.

And as big as Glover is now, he’s about to get bigger. Next year, he’ll co-star with Beyoncé in Jon Favreau’s computer-generated animated remake of The Lion King. He voices Simba, the lead lion. In other words, he’s the star.

As we manoeuvred through Atlanta’s labyrinthine streets, I asked Glover what he wanted to do next. His answer was deceptively simple: “I just want more freedom.”

And what will you do with it?

“Make stuff that no one else will make. Part of the reason I do what I do is because I’m the only one who can do it.”

There’s no being objective about Donald Glover — not for me, anyway. I realise that his success means that Glover belongs to the world. He’s without question the best-known Donald outside the White House. But for a young black nerd like me, Glover has always been something else, too. His career in show business started in the mid-Noughties, and some of his earliest fans were the self-identified weirdos who felt they couldn’t relate to the world as it was then. As he began to make a name for himself in New York’s improv scene, you had the sense that he got it. He looked like us and talked like us, and seemed to be speaking for a segment of young people who were geeky and quirky and mostly ignored. We loved him for it.

Glover made such an impression doing improv that when he graduated from New York University, Tina Fey offered him a writing job on 30 Rock, his first big break. He stayed there for three years, appearing in front of the camera in the occasional episode (once as a young Tracy Morgan), until he told Fey he wanted to move to Los Angeles and try stand-up.

In 2009, Glover quit 30 Rock and was unemployed for a grand total of six days before he was cast as Troy Barnes in Dan Harmon’s oddball NBC sitcom Community. Troy was the resident dumb guy, the character who sold the show’s concepts and writing with his personality; he made Harmon’s universe believable by playing a believably relatable role. Glover’s comedic instincts made him perfect for the job, and he quickly became the heart of the series. By the time he left, during the fifth season, Glover was no longer a quirky unknown quantity with a few side hustles. Now people’s parents had heard of him, and Hollywood was starting to realise he might be a bankable commodity.

“I started seeing more of the world and getting in more arguments and talking about more shit."

While he was on Community, Glover filmed two stand-up specials for Comedy Central. The first aired in 2010, and the second in 2011. In both, he essentially played himself: a sharp, self-aware twentysomething. The material was mostly confessional, and it gave nearly equal time to jokes about dicks and jokes about race.

The same week his second special aired, he released Camp, his first serious rap album. Glover had been performing under the name Childish Gambino since shortly after college. On the record, he cast himself as a rap outsider. The subjects of his songs spanned everything from past flings to racial alienation. While its critical reception was mixed, Camp debuted at number 11 on the Billboard 200 US album chart. He previewed it on a cross-country tour called “IAMDONALD”, a polymathic fusion of hip-hop, stand-up and sketch comedy that, at the time, felt like a promise that the world was changing.

In 2013, Glover dropped his second studio album, Because the Internet. Certified gold, it earned Glover a pair of Grammy nominations and a much warmer reception from music critics. Its follow-up, 2016’s Awaken, My Love!, brought in five Grammy nods. The album cemented Gambino as a radio star and put him on the big screen: 'Redbone', a sultry, George Clinton–inspired funk jam, played over the opening credits of 2017’s Get Out and went triple platinum.

The more consequential happening of 2013 by far, however, was a deal Glover signed with FX to write, star in and produce “a comedy set against the backdrop of the Atlanta music scene”. Thus came Atlanta, which debuted in the US in 2016 and was an instant hit with critics and viewers. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s available on the BBC’s iPlayer.) That success was unexpected, according to Hiro Murai, who directed seven episodes of Atlanta in its first season and directed or produced all of the episodes in season two. (He also shot the video for 'This is America'.) “It really felt like we made this thing in a vacuum,” Murai said. Much of its DNA came from Clapping for the Wrong Reasons, Murai said, a short he and Glover made in 2013 about a rap star aimlessly moving from room to room in his mansion on some coast, drifting among the friends and possessions he’d collected.

Glover with Lakeith Stanfield and Brian Tyree Henry in Atlanta. Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Atlanta also messed with TV conventions, slyly planting surrealist notes — a black Justin Bieber and an invisible car — into an already-winking show. It developed, Glover told me, as a result of hanging out with his brother Stephen, who’s also a writer for the show. “I started seeing more of the world and getting in more arguments and talking about more shit. Like black women telling me, ‘Black men don’t do shit for us.’ I’m like, ‘Damn, you really feel that way?’ And they’re like, ‘100 per cent.’ ”

The success of the first season was great for Glover, but he was aware the second season had a lot to live up to. The first day back on set, Murai told me, “just felt like Bizarro World.” They took such a long hiatus they’d forgotten, at least at first, how to make the show. “It feels like it grew into something else. It’s a little more short-story-oriented.”

Glover said it was good to be back in the neighbourhoods that make up Atlanta’s set: “It felt like we could walk through the ’hood and people knew who we were.” And then there’s the night they were filming in Bankhead. “Shots started popping off. Like, ‘pop, pop, pop, pop’,” Glover said. The cast and crew stood around, uncertain, until they heard faster return fire. “I wasn’t hearing it hit the leaves yet. Sometimes you hear a gunshot” — here he approximated the sound of, well, bullets hitting leaves — “where you know it’s fucking close.” No one on set wanted to wait to hear that sound. Everyone got low and went inside; production was cancelled for the night.

“That’s part of the respect,” Glover said. “If you go in the ocean, you have to respect the ocean. You know that you can drown. I don’t want people to think life is a fucking Disneyland, and we’re working, like, ‘Isn’t it cool that people live this way?’ It’s not.”

Over dinner, Glover told me that he gets anxious when he’s close to something real. “I know season two of Atlanta is something because it makes me nervous.” Bullets-whipping-through-leaves nervous.

“I told my agent, ‘I wanna be Lando’.”

Glover was born in 1983 and raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the site of the largest Confederate memorial in the US. “If people saw how I grew up, they would be triggered,” he said. “Confederate flags everywhere. I had friends who were white, whose parents were very sweet to me but were also like, ‘Don’t ever date him.’ I saw that what was being offered on Sesame Street didn’t exist.”

When he was 11, Glover wrote himself a letter, not unlike the one Michael Jackson wrote himself in 1979, when he vowed to shock the world with his talents. Glover’s version read: “I’m gonna try and I’m gonna save the world.”

Though his parents raised him as a Jehovah’s Witness — a faith that has strict prohibitions on pop culture — Glover says Star Wars occupied a rare space in his home. It was important enough that his dad took him out of school to see the prequels. (Yup, the prequels.) He remembers biting the lightsaber off his Darth Vader action figure when he was a kid, but recalls his blue-caped Lando Calrissian figurine even more intensely. Until the Jedi Mace Windu came along in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, Lando was the only black person in the Star Wars universe. (After Windu, played by Samuel L Jackson, John Boyega’s Finn, from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, made three.) In the original trilogy, Lando goes from a fiercely independent smuggler trying to avoid the Empire’s scrutiny to a genuine hero who saves Princess Leia, Han Solo, C-3PO, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker and R2-D2. “I had a doll that I slept with — the only black doll in the store — that my mom bought for me. And my dad bought me Lando,” Glover said.

Some years ago, he heard a rumour that a movie featuring Lando was in the works. “I told my agent, ‘I wanna be Lando,’” but his agent didn’t like his chances. “That was exactly what I needed to hear,” Glover told me, “because I’m the person who’s not supposed to make it, so much so that I don’t think people recognise where I came from and what I’ve done. At a certain point, it does look easy... I was like, ‘Oh, OK, cool.’ I studied, I watched the movies a lot, and I killed it, because I was ready.”

Glover plays smooth-talking Lando Calrissian opposite Alden Ehrenreich’s Han in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

Glover called his father as soon as he landed the role and told him, “Yo, you’re not gonna believe what I’m going to be doing next year.” The best part, he said, was bringing his father to the set on the Canary Islands, where the production team had built an entire city.

Ron Howard, Solo: a Star Wars Story’s director, told me that Glover was so trained and focused that he didn’t always have to use a stunt double. “I loved his take on Lando and his passion for the character,” Howard said, noting how deeply Glover gets the different ways the character can entertain an audience. “It’s charm, it’s humour, it’s an intelligence, there’s a roguishness he understands without selling out the character’s traits,” he said. “You’d be a fool not to engage him creatively.”

Landing Simba in The Lion King remake went similarly. When Favreau offered him the part, he again felt the gravity of the role, and the responsibility to do right by a character that defined his childhood universe. “I get why people don’t like remakes,” Glover said, “and I only want to work with people who understand why people don’t like remakes.”

His unshakeable sense of his own taste comes from his mother, who instilled in him a respect for things made well. Glover says it started with fast food. “My mom used to take me to Chick-fil-A. We all know it’s all fast food; none of it’s good for you. But it’s better than McDonald’s. She’d be like, ‘Look at these cups. Look at the colour pattern. Look at the way this tastes. Look at how it doesn’t taste great after a couple of hours.’ ”

Glover and his partner Michelle now have two young children of their own. A respect for quality is already something he’s trying to pass down to them — how to recognise what’s good and what’s not, how to consume discerningly.

Glover also allows that fatherhood has had its own peculiar effects on him. “Let me make this short and sweet,” he said. “Every step of your life once you’re an adult, you realise what being a teenager is. Once you’re a teenager, you realise what being a child is.” Each phase, he says, provides context for the one that came before it. “Children are life’s greatest context. Parenthood really does make you something more. It asks you questions that no one is ever ready for, and that you’re always ready for. It’s like ayahuasca.”

“Black people don't have the narrative over their story. It’s always been written by somebody else."

In the car again, we headed for Inman Park, one of Atlanta’s older, now-gentrifying neighbourhoods. We found a tapas restaurant. It was early evening and the vibe was mellow. Nobody, aside from our hostess, gave Glover a second look. That is, until a tall, tattooed guy wearing a leather jacket walked up to us, told Glover he was a huge fan. “You never know who you meet,” the guy marvelled while talking to Glover. “I love your work. I love how you give it back to the city, broadcasting that shit, bro,” he said.

Glover’s care for black people and the black American experience is undeniable. When he says he wants “to make stuff that no one else will make,” he means stuff that is going to touch black people. “Black people do not have the narrative over their story. It’s always been written by somebody else,” he said. “I also think it’s like we have PTSD. There’s a lot of things that have happened to us that we don’t completely understand and we’re not getting help to understand. That’s why information is so powerful and necessary. If you understand, then you don’t let it happen again.”

The night of Donald Trump’s election, Glover said, he considered leaving the country with his family. “We understand most people don’t have that luxury, but it’s important, especially as a black person, to be like, ‘I’m not constrained to America.’ Although America is part of me, I’m going to be black everywhere.”

Glover told me he’d much prefer racism to be out in the open so that everybody knows where everyone else stands. “It’s like being in a basketball game and you’re like, ‘Hey, can everybody not flop? [The equivalent of a dive in football.] Can we just agree: If you get fouled for real, that’s fine, but please don’t flop?’ People are like, ‘No, pretending to fall is part of the game.’”

At the same time, Glover recognises people will take whatever perceived advantages they can get, because American life feels structured like a zero-sum game in terms of race — most of us believe that we lose some of our status every time another group makes an equivalent gain.

“You can’t get people to be honest about that stuff because if they can have an edge, they’re going to do that,” he said, before comparing racial struggles to the ones women face in Hollywood from the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. “I was actually just reading about Matt Damon and he’s like, ‘There’s a culture of outrage.’ I’m like, ‘Well, they have a reason to be outraged,’ ” Glover said. “I think it’s a lot of dudes just being scared. They’re like, ‘What if I did something and I didn’t realise it?’ I’m like, ‘Deal with it.’ ”

As to his own future as an artist, “All you really want to do is make something that stands the test of time,” he said. “That’s all that matters. I like Erykah Badu and Lauryn Hill and Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. That’s everyday music. That’s music that people just put on and they’re like, ‘Man, this song makes me feel good. This song, it helps me get through the day.’”