Barack Obama reveals Malia removed last name from credits of short films

Malia Obama used a nom de plume when screening and submitting her most recent short film, which the former first daughter worked on with Emmy winner Doland Glover, to film festivals.

In an interview clip posted to social media on Wednesday, Barack Obama is seen sitting for an interview with Ryan Clark The Pivot Podcastalongside former NFL player-hosts Fred Taylor and Channing Crowder. In a post on his Instagram page and X-post (formerly Twitter), Clark provided the context for this bit of their conversation.

“President Obama’s daughters Malia and Sasha will always be known as the children of Michelle and Barack Obama. It seems like the ultimate cheat, but it’s something none of the girls want,” he wrote. “Malia didn’t even use her last name when she was working on a project Donald Glover. The former president has even gone so far as to make deals with the White House press to exclude them from their surveillance. There are still some paparazzi, but overall the girls are extremely down to earth.”

Clark tells Obama in the clip that his son plays football for Notre Dame, and in a recent article he was asked if he was the son of an NFL player. Paraphrasing his son’s response, Clark tells the former president that he told the reporter he was running away because kids would say his opportunities only came because of his father. Now that he’s older, Clark’s son says he can embrace his father’s legacy because he understands “what it means to represent that name.”

Clark then asked Obama how much of an impression he makes on his girls is that they are finding their way in the world on their own.

“The challenge for us is to get them any help at all,” Obama responded. “They are very sensitive about these kinds of things. They are very stubborn about that. Malia, she makes movies, so she made her first movie. And you know, I’m going to be a dad, I’ll brag a little bit…her first movie went to Sundance and all those fancy film festivals, and she didn’t use Obama as a director in the credits.”

Malia, he revealed, used the name Malia Ann for her credit in the short film – Ann was the former first daughter’s middle name. Her short film, The heart, stars TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe, LaTonya Borsay and John Weigand. Its description reads: ‘An unexpected request and a terrible loss draw attention to the intense and complex relationship between a mother and her son.’

Obama explained to the podcast hosts that he told Malia he didn’t think her secret would fly under the radar.

“I was like, ‘You know they know who you are,’” he said. “And she’s all like, ‘You know what? I want them to see it the first time and not have that association in any way.” So I think our daughters are doing everything they can not to take advantage of that.”

Obama then explained that while his family lived in the White House, he made a sort of deal with the press corps there so they could follow him, talk about him, and essentially do whatever they wanted as long as they did one thing : ‘Go away’. my children alone. Because they have the right to grow up,” he recalled to the hosts.

‘They didn’t choose this, did they? Let them grow up,” he continued. “And it’s a credit to the press that they left them alone. Now that they’ve gotten older, there’s some paparazzi stuff going on, and it drives them crazy, you know, because their attitude is, ‘We’re not looking for that.’ So they are under house arrest.”

The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Donald Glover about The heart project in an interview in April when the star and TV writer helped produce her short film under his production company Gilga. Malia graduated from Harvard University in 2021 and assisted the writing team at HBO’s Girlswas given a writing assignment for the Glover-led Amazon series Swarm.