Donald Glover Secretly Became a Father of 3 During Quarantine

Donald Glover revealed he is now a father of three after welcoming a little boy earlier this year. The 37-year-old Atlanta star casually revealed his baby news during a conversation with I May Destroy You‘s Michaela Coel for GQ, reflecting on welcoming a child just as Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the world with the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25

“You know, I had [a kid] during the coronavirus,” he told a surprised Coel after son Legend, 3, entered the frame. The Childish Gambino rapper is also father to 2-year-old son Drake with partner Michelle White. “It was nuts. I was in the hospital bed. My son had just been born, like, an hour before and I was watching the George Floyd video. It was such a weird moment,” he continued of the “intense, weird” moment in which he found himself watching the horrific video of Floyd’s death while also basking in the birth of his son.

“So you’re sitting there and I had just had this amazing, joyful, expanding moment, plus my dad had passed away recently, so [my son] was named after my father,” he explained. “I don’t even know what, really, the word is to describe it. It was just expanding: the empathy and compassion and the terror and the joy of it.”

Glover explained the moment as having “the future in your hands,” but also having to explain to his oldest son, “‘Why are people angry? Why are people marching?’ ‘Well, you look like this…’” It’s a “heavy” task, the Community actor explained, not only communicating the reality of racism to a young child, but to people who don’t experience discrimination based on the color of their skin.

“I don’t think everybody’s ever going to be ready. All you can really do is give the medicine out. It’s not your job to prepare them for their reaction. It’s your job to make the medicine,” he told Coel of addressing profound sorrow and race in their artwork. “It’s funny, even over here in America, people aren’t sure of how to handle these subjects. But I feel like this is a perfect time for it. It’s not going to be easy. I had a friend of mine, a white male guy, and he was like, ‘I’m doing research [on race]. I’m trying to do as much work as I can and reflect. But it’s hard work.’ It should be hard: stop trying to make yourself look cool on social media doing this. It’s going to be awkward.”