They Cloned Tyrone Director Breaks Down Surprising Epilogue Reveal

Netflix’s They Cloned Tyrone ends with a seemingly normal final scene, featuring the film’s three heroes overcoming evil and preparing to start a new chapter of their lives. What viewers probably didn’t expect, however, is for the film to resume a few seconds later and bring a whole new meaning to its title. There is no character named Tyrone for the majority of the movie, but the epilogue scene introduces Tyrone for the very first time. Tyrone is a clone, just like Fontaine, also played by John Boyega and stuck in the same loop as the character featured throughout the entire movie.

It’s a wild epilogue reveal that not only hints at how widespread the cloning experiments are, but also how Fontaine’s victory in the Glen can help others across the country rise up and break the cycle. It seems odd to name the film after a character that only appears in the final scene, but it turns out Tyrone wasn’t always in the plans. 

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, They Cloned Tyrone director Juel Taylor revealed that the creation of Tyrone just came from the creative team trying to answer the question of who Tyrone was, since they had already decided on the film’s name.

“Tyrone is just semantics at a certain point,” Taylor said. “When we were conceiving the story, we pitched it without a script. So we sold the movie before we wrote the script, and we had a lot of different iterations before we wrote it. And originally, Frog was gonna be Tyrone. He would’ve had old-man makeup and he’d be dressed in a certain way that you don’t quite recognize that it’s the same actor. And then at a certain point in the movie, you’d realize, ‘Oh, the reason this dude knows all this stuff is because he’s literally you [Tyrone] …’

“But we did always know that the main character’s name would not be Tyrone. We just thought it was funny. The movie was going to be called Reagan Era, and They Cloned Tyrone was just a joke title. But enough people said, ‘You clearly have to call it They Cloned Tyrone.’ And I was like, ‘That’s kind of goofy, though.’ And so I just felt that the title should feel completely random and that the main character’s name can’t be Tyrone. Why was that the case? I think it’s because the first thing that a contrarian would do is name the character something else. So, to follow someone not named Tyrone was just baked into the identity of the movie from the beginning. And then the question became, ‘Well, who is Tyrone?’ and the answer to that question ties it all together by the time you get to the end.”

Tyrone Doesn’t Set Up a Sequel

Just because Tyrone is revealed at the end of the movie, and he seemingly has his own story to tell, he isn’t supposed to be some important tease about a spinoff or sequel. According to Taylor, if another movie ever comes from this story, it needs to have absolutely nothing to do with the original.

“The only way the story continues is if it has nothing to do with the first one,” he explained. “We always joked that Fontaine, Yo-Yo [Teyonah Parris] and Slick Charles [Jamie Foxx] are gonna start a bakery, so we’re just gonna make Mystic Pizza next time and not even reference anything that happened in the first movie. It’s gonna be the three of them going into the restaurant business. So, if we ever did another one, it would have absolutely nothing to do with the first movie. It’s an open-ended story, but it’s a closed loop in terms of character. They’ve done what they needed to do in terms of finding out who they are and what they want out of their lives.”

They Cloned Tyrone is available to stream on Netflix.