As the brothers grew up in Stone Mountain, just east of Atlanta, they came to share an understanding that life was a bad dream and that laughter was a way to wake yourself up. Glover’s father, Donald, Sr., was a postal worker, and his mother, Beverly, was a day-care provider. After they had Donald and Stephen, the couple took in numerous foster children and adopted two of them: some of the children had been molested, some had parents who were murdered, some would die. “We had a cousin with AIDS and we couldn’t keep her and save her,” Glover said. “All the drugs she needed were in New York City and California. That still feels like a family tragedy.”

The Glovers were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They believed that Satan controls life on earth, that only a hundred and forty-four thousand anointed Christians will be saved to Heaven with Jesus, and that we are living out the last days before Armageddon. Stephen Glover said, “We were wised up early to not celebrating our birthdays and that there was no Santa Claus and no magic. Our mom made us watch ‘Mississippi Burning’ when I was six, and she always warned me about wearing saggy pants and said, ‘If someone sucks your penis, come tell me.’ ” Glover said, “I know Mom was doing all that to protect us, but it gave me nightmares. I wouldn’t go into bathrooms alone or eat anything except turkey.”

Beverly Glover forbade all television but PBS—animal shows and slavery documentaries. Donald, Sr., sometimes let the kids watch Bugs Bunny cartoons and Bill Murray movies. Glover would secretly turn the television on with the sound low and tape episodes of “The Simpsons” on his Talkboy recorder so that he and Stephen could listen to them later: archeologists reconstructing the popular culture of their own time.

Glover announced early on that he wanted to attend N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts and then write for “The Simpsons.” That seemed unattainable, but so did most of his desires. When Nintendo 64 came out, in 1996, his mother declared it too expensive. Stephen Glover told me, “I said, ‘Oh, well.’ But Donald heard on Radio Disney that they were giving a Nintendo 64 away to the ninetieth caller every day for a week. He listened all week and kept calling in until he gauged the perfect time, and one day he ran upstairs and said, ‘I won it!’ He’s always been able to will what he wants.”

In Glover’s living room, his son, Legend, ran in clutching a plastic giraffe. Glover hugged him and fell backward. “Shoe, Daddy, there!” Legend cried, pointing at his own shoe. “That’s right,” his father said, holding him aloft.

As Legend bustled over to show me the giraffe, Glover said that he thinks of reality as a program and his talent as hacking the code: “I learn fast—I figured out the algorithm.” Grasping the machine’s logic had risks. “When people become depressed and kill themselves, it’s because all they see is the algorithm, the loop,” he said. But it was also exhilarating. When he was ten, he said, “I realized, if I want to be good at P.E., I have to be good at basketball. So I went home and shot baskets in our driveway for six hours, until my mother called me in. The next day, I was good enough that you wouldn’t notice I was bad. And I realized my superpower.” During a lunch break on set one day, in the gym of a Baptist church, I had watched Glover play 21 against five crew members. He made three long jumpers, then began charging the lane to launch Steph Curry-style runners—stylish, ineffective forays facilitated by the crew’s reluctance to play tough D. “It sounds like I’m sucking my own dick—‘Oh, he thinks he’s great at everything,’ ” he said now, leaning forward. “But what if you had that power?”

I asked why, given his talents and ambitions, he’d bothered to do a two-scene cameo as a small-time crook in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” It was clear why Marvel and Sony, the studios involved, cast him. Kevin Feige, Marvel’s president, told me, “When we tested the film, even with that tiny role, Donald was one of the audience’s favorite characters.” (As Feige acknowledged, the decision was also inspired by an Internet campaign to make Glover the first black Spider-Man.) Glover said he took the role because “I learn so much. I learn how Marvel movies work, how to handle guest stars, how to make execs happy when they come on set. I gain some of your power. Only now I’m running out of places to learn, at least in America.”

When Glover directed “Atlanta” for the first time, on the BET episode, he said, “I wasn’t worried that I was going to shit the bed. I was only worried how people might take it, that I was just coming in as the creator and assuming I could be a director. I don’t look at what they do as easy.” He grinned, slowly. “I just look at what they do.” Hiro Murai told me that Glover’s aptitude could be galling: “The day before Donald directed, he said, ‘Hey, do you have any tips?’ I was mad, because I knew, You’re going to be fine—you’ll pick it up naturally, the way you pick up everything. And then he won an Emmy!” (Glover began his acceptance speech by saying, “First, I want to thank the great algorithm that put us all here.”)

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Is there anything you’re bad at? “To be honest, no. Probably just people. People don’t like to be studied, or bested.” He shrugged. “I’m fine with it. I don’t really like people that much. People accept me now because I have power, but they still think, Oh, he thinks he’s the golden flower of the black community, thinks he’s so different.” He laughed. “But I am, though! I feel like Jesus. I do feel chosen. My struggle is to use my humanity to create a classic work—but I don’t know if humanity is worth it, or if we’re going to make it. I don’t know if there’s much time left.”

Legend offered him the giraffe and asked, “What does a giraffe say?” His father repeated the question, giving it serious thought. “I have no idea what a giraffe says.” Michelle passed through, very pregnant but serene, to collect Legend and head to Whole Foods. Glover had a nearly wordless exchange with her that conveyed concern for her health, the duty to remain with me, and a curiosity about dinner.

He stretched his legs, wincing. “I tell stories because that’s the best way of spreading information,” he said. “We’re all tricking and toying and playing with each other’s senses to affect this thing hidden inside our skulls.” He drew a circle in the air, then jabbed a finger, trying to penetrate it. “That’s what Earn is trying to do with Alfred—tell him a story so he can get into his understanding and make him do what he wants.” He pulled his hand back, sheepishly. “I just realized I’m drawing an egg-and-sperm kinda thing.”

Do you look up to anyone? “I don’t see anyone out there who’s better,” he said. “Maybe Elon Musk. But I don’t know yet if he’s a supervillain. Elon is working on ways for storytelling not to be the best way of spreading information.” Musk’s new company, Neuralink, intends to merge human consciousness with computers, allowing us to download others’ thoughts. “It will turn us into a connected macroorganism, but it will make our individual desires seem trivial,” Glover went on. “Sometimes I get mad at him—‘You think people are insignificant!’ But we probably are at the end of the storytelling age. It’s my job to compress the last bits of information for people before it passes.” He sighed. “The thing I imagine myself being in the future doesn’t exist yet. I wish it was just ‘Oh, I’ll be Oprah,’ or ‘I’ll be Dave Chappelle.’ But it’s not that. It’s something different and more, something involving fairness and restoring a sense of honor. Sometimes I dream of it, but how do you explain a dream where you never see your father, but you know that that’s him over your shoulder?” It was very quiet. “It’d be nice to feel less lonely.”