LaKeith Stanfield has built a career on being unpredictable. Since starring in Short Term 12, the Californian actor has featured in Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Boots Riley’s surreal satire Sorry to Bother You, Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out and Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Equally at home in satire, romance or a biblical comedy, Stanfield is now stretching that range further with two new films: Shane Black’s noir-tinged Play Dirty and Lynne Ramsay’s long-awaited Die, My Love. Here, the actor reflects on the stories he wants to tell, and why he’s beginning to look beyond acting to life behind the camera
When LaKeith Stanfield was a kid, he used to put on puppet shows. He’d do this at his aunt’s house, where he remembers there was a “giant bed” more than twice his size. “Or maybe it wasn’t that big, but I was very short, like two feet tall,” the actor recalls with a grin. Stanfield would hide behind the bed, raising his hands to play the puppets. “I was not seen, and I liked that,” he says. As the puppet master he could “tell the story from a God’s perspective”, he explains. “I’m looking at all the pieces on the board, rather than me being a piece on the board.”
Stanfield’s ability to see the bigger picture has allowed him to shape his own story. Since his breakthrough as troubled teenager Marcus in 2013’s Short Term 12, Stanfield, now 34, has worked with directors as different in sensibility as studio-favourite sleuth enthusiast Rian Johnson (Knives Out), anti-capitalist rabble-rouser Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You) and Ava DuVernay (Selma). His idiosyncratic portfolio spans satire, romantic comedy, one revisionist Western and a very funny biblical epic. In 2021, Stanfield received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah. He played the antagonist, an FBI informant who infiltrates the Black Panther Party. On screen, Stanfield is magnetic and a little unsettling. His soulful, expressive eyes and bone-dry sense of humour are an asset, and easy to spot.
“How are you doing? I’m sorry, I’m in the middle of an interview, but nice to meet you,” I hear him tell a fan who stops him to say hello. He is video calling from Los Angeles, where he has literally just stepped off a plane. “I’m quite distracted,” he admits, apologetically. “But I just got to this airport and I’m trying to find my way out of the slammer.” Flustered, he struggles to locate the arrivals area where a car is coming to pick him up. A stranger with long hair who “kinda looked like Jesus… or the white conception of Jesus” eventually points him in the right direction. “One of the perks of this Hollywood thing is that people will randomly help you because they recognise you,” he says. “They’ll be like, ‘Alright, what do you need man?’”
Friendliness goes a long way in Stanfield’s world. “I don’t really like impersonal relations,” he explains. It’s why he’s not a big fan of New York City, where he’s just flown in from. “When there are a lot of people around, we might as well say hello to one another,” he says. I can picture it now: Stanfield in the middle of a crowded Times Square, waving affably, jostled by unimpressed passers-by. “When I go to New York, I’m pretty much the only person with that thought,” he jokes. When asked if that impulse comes from his family, he pauses. “I don’t think so. They weren’t particularly polite,” he says, laughing. “I think it’s just me.”
Stanfield emits ‘West Coast chill’, coming from “San Bernardino, Riverside, Victorville, the Inland Empire” in California. He says there wasn’t a lot of money growing up. “We ate the same thing every day – a lot of hot dogs, a lot of oatmeal. But hey! We were eating.” One luxury he did have was a big extended family, whom he loved to entertain. The living room was his stage, and as a kid he got used to their applause. Once, however, “I was doing a performance and nobody clapped at the end,” he says. He remembers commanding the whole room to clap as everyone’s eyes widened. “I was like, ‘I said CLAP!’ And then everybody started clapping, and laughing.” He chuckles. “They probably thought it was the cutest thing.”
As a child, Stanfield was a dreamer who spent a lot of time in his head. He was “always thinking about how things could be, or playing in the mind”, he says. “I still do that now.” And when he wasn’t creating characters, he was watching them. His aunt had an old television, the kind where you had to manually tune the knobs. “I remember lying in front of it and playing with the broken knob while the TV broadcasted from the VHS that was hooked up to it.” It was the 1990s and he was allowed to watch “pretty much anything, whether it was child-appropriate or not”. One of the VHS tapes the family had laying around was Lethal Weapon, the 1987 buddy cop film written by Shane Black, starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. “It left an impression,” he says. It was a film Stanfield would watch on repeat.
It was partly why he jumped at the opportunity to work with Black on his new heist film Play Dirty. A dark comedy set at Christmas, it takes inspiration from hard-boiled crime novelist Donald E Westlake and his Parker series. Stanfield plays Grofield, a debonair theatre proprietor and professional thief with a selection of fabulous hats. Grofield is the accomplice to Mark Wahlberg’s Parker, and comic foil to the character too. “Everything from those noir times was fun, funny and witty,” says Stanfield about the script. After a slew of more serious parts, the prospect of doing something light and easy-going appealed to him.
It’s in stark contrast to the role he plays in another upcoming film, Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love. The psychological thriller marks the long-awaited return of Scottish director Ramsay, and features Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother experiencing postpartum psychosis. As Grace, Lawrence channels ambivalence and horniness simultaneously, emotions that are rarely associated with early motherhood, let alone seen on screen. Stanfield plays Karl, a handsome stranger who becomes the locus of her fantasies.
In the real world, Stanfield’s wife Kasmere Trice gave birth to their child in 2023. Witnessing both her pregnancy and her childbirth was a visceral and sometimes affirming glimpse into early motherhood. “Something that don’t really get that much of an insight into, in that category of discussion about being a mother, is how your body feels, how you feel, hormonal changes and things,” he says. “You don’t really see too much stuff about that, so I thought this was really valuable.” He found the experience of fatherhood useful while preparing to work with Ramsay on Die My Love. When they first met, at a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in LA, he was taken aback by how “a tiny body can be such a big presence”. He describes her as a playful genius: “a child in an adult’s body”. At times, he says, he sees himself as a big kid too.
For his first paid acting job, Stanfield received a $500 cheque. There’s something childlike about the way he can still recall the feeling. “I thought that was a lot of money, and I was very happy to have that,” he remembers. The cheque was stamped with the words ‘Entertainment Partners’. For a while he kept it in a glass case, unable to believe it was real.
At the time, he was so eager to be on set that “you didn’t even have to pay me”, he says. He was desperate to be working, and impatient to arrive on the scene. In 2014 he received an Independent Spirit nomination for Best Supporting Actor, for his debut film role in Short Term 12. It was at this point he sensed something had shifted. “I felt like I was beginning an initiation into a different chapter of life,” he says, “I was like ‘What does this mean? Ok, here goes.’”
He spent the next decade working with a slew of celebrated auteurs, an experience that has taught him different ways to tell a story. The next thing Stanfield wants to conquer is directing something himself: “I want to give my perspective.” He says he’s inspired by the fearless attitude of filmmakers like Boots Riley and Shaka King. “I love that about Boots, I love that about Shaka – though I shouldn’t necessarily say they’re fearless as much as brazen.” Another lesson he’s picked up on set is good pacing. “I like the rhythm with which Ava DuVernay is able to navigate a scene, and how she’s able to start it off.”
The boy who put on puppet shows for his aunt had to find a way to get his audience invested, he says, “without it being about me”. For the adult Stanfield, producing and directing films is a way to channel little LaKeith. It’s early days, but he has started to write his own material. “But when I want it to be really good”, he says, “I’ll bring in a real writer.”
LaKeith wears Paul Smith throughout
Photography Kennedi Carter
Styling Anna Schilling
Photography assistant Khalilah Pianta
Groomer Tasha Reiko Brown using CHANEL Beauty
Production Hyperion LA
This article is taken from Port issue 37. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
