Keegan-Michael Key Says He and Jordan Peele 'Don't See Each Other That Often Anymore': 'A Tragedy' (Exclusive)

"When we were on camera, it was alchemy," Keegan-Michael Key recalls of his fellow 'Key & Peele' creator

When Keegan-Michael Key first met Jordan Peele, he says, “It was a thrilling time in my life.”

Years before the duo known as Key & Peele would launch their 2012–2015 sketch comedy series of that name, the two were “sharing a mind” starring on Fox’s MADtv starting in 2004, Key, 53, tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue.

“We lived together for a few months and would write and talk about comedy — who we liked and why we liked them and how that worked in the architecture of what we were trying to build comedically,” he says.

Because they had both previously trained at Chicago’s Second City and “shared a creative language,” adds Key, “when we were on camera, it was alchemy. It was just like, ‘Why is this working?’”

Related: 'SNL' : Keegan-Michael Key Makes Hosting Debut, Gets Mistaken for Jordan Peele by a Fan

Unfortunately, in the near-decade since the Emmy-winning Key & Peele concluded on Comedy Central, “we don't see each other that often anymore,” he says of Peele, 45. “Which is, to me, a tragedy.”

After taking the comedy world by storm with their hit series, Key and Peele have created chances to experience that alchemy again, producing and starring in the 2016 action-comedy film Keanu, appearing together in the first season of FX’s Fargo and voicing paired characters in 2019’s Toy Story 4 and 2022’s Wendell & Wild.

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But, as Key notes, “your lives start to evolve and move in different directions.” Peele and wife Chelsea Peretti live in Los Angeles while Key and his wife Elle are in New York City, he adds.

“Our evolution, I think, is tied to both of what our desires are,” continues the Transformers One star. “His desire was to start exploring the horror genre, and my desire was to do more dramatic work like I had been trained in school.” After Key & Peele’s success, “both of us jumped to another platform — but we needed that first platform.”

Related: Keegan-Michael Key Reveals His Wife's Funny Reaction to His Wonka Transformation (Exclusive)

In fact, fans can divine the two comedians’ futures by watching their trajectory on the sketch series, says Key. “I was playing the clown more and doing more physical comedy in the beginning of our time together, and then I found myself evolving into playing more of the straight roles and teeing up Jordan to play the clown.”

Season 1 of Key & Peele features “not a lot of improvising,” he recalls. “It wasn't till the second season, third season that [we’d] loosen up and improvise… And we wrote some sketches that were just very strange and weird. And that was a fun part of the evolution.”

Animated prequel Transformers One, in which Key plays B-127 a.k.a. Bumblebee, is in theaters now. It also features the voices of Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry and Scarlett Johansson.

For more on Key, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

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