Just Try to Pin Down LaKeith Stanfield

Like an apparition, LaKeith Stanfield appears from behind a column: tall and rangy in a Yankees cap and Gucci loafers, a sly expression on his face. It’s a perfectly LaKeith Stanfield moment—delightful and a little creepy, an echo of his role as Andre, the haunted character from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, probably the movie most responsible for putting Stanfield on the map. “I’ve always been mischievous,” he tells me. “I think that’s what I like about characters too. It’s like finding little things about them that are just off of what was there on the page.”

In the last few years, Stanfield has earned a reputation as a somewhat mysterious and private actor. Onscreen, his half-lidded eyes and laid-back smile telegraph unpredictable eccentricity, a mix of laconic, comic, weird, and vulnerable that seemed to appear fully formed in Cassius, the awkward protagonist of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, and Darius, the drug-dealer-cum-philosopher in FX’s Atlanta.

Clothing by Ralph Lauren Purple Label.

Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.

Here in New York, where he is filming Taylor Sheridan’s upcoming thriller, F.A.S.T., Stanfield seems ready to go off script yet again—as a confessional, emotionally open, and deeply inquisitive actor working to balance leading man ambitions with his relatively new role as a husband and father. Stanfield has three children, including a new baby by wife Kasmere Trice, and has gone through extensive therapy to adjust to life as a rising star, especially after his Oscar-nominated performance in Judas and the Black Messiah. “I have tried to stifle my emotions before, for reasons of survivability, but I don’t think that that’s me,” he says. “I think that I am a person who feels a lot of things, and I think that’s okay. I think I have to allow myself to do that. And I think that part of my authenticity is just to feel. And to share.”

Stanfield’s tattooed arms are a reminder of how far he’s come. One of his more recent additions—the letter A on his right arm—was done while filming Atlanta, but most were made by “a gangster dude who lived around the corner from my house” in the hardscrabble suburb of Victorville, California, where he grew up. The first one, which cost him $5, was his mother’s name, Karen, with the phrase “True Love of My Life.” Stanfield’s mother raised him and his two brothers on a salary from fast-food restaurants, and his choice of tribute to her was calculated to mitigate her disapproval. “And then once I got away with that one,” he says, “I got, like, tat fever.” (His latest ink: the word Magnolia over his right eyebrow, which is both the street he grew up on and the name of his daughter.)

Stanfield’s early impressions of acting came from seeing Larenz Tate in Menace II Society and Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love. But he also loved comic stars like Robin Williams and especially Jim Carrey, whose rubber-faced transformations on the TV show In Living Color were an early influence. “I was like, I want to be like that,” he says.

Stanfield joined the drama club in high school, signed to a modeling agency, and landed his first significant role in 2013, in an indie film called Short Term 12, which saw him costar with Rami Malek. Finding his way in Hollywood wasn’t easy. A rap single he released this year, “Fast Life,” was written during his first brush with fame after Get Out, when he was overindulging in alcohol and surrounding himself with hangers-on. “I had a bunch of people around me, doing all their different vices,” he recalls. “And I’m drinking and I’m like, Good drugs and friends,” which became a repeated lyric. In retrospect, “none of those people were actually my friends,” he says. “When you’re not primed and mature and don’t have the strength yet to navigate it, it can be all-encompassing and consuming. So I had a lot to learn when I wrote that song.”

The title of another song is a reminder to himself: “Do Better.” He says therapy helped him separate himself from the characters he inhabits. “There is often very little distinction between what you’re experiencing as an actor [and real life],” he says. “For sure, your body doesn’t know, but sometimes your mind doesn’t know either, and you have to go through rituals to alert your body and your spirit that this is not real.”

Jacket and pants by Dior; shirt by Ralph Lauren Purple Label; bow tie by Notch; cummerbund by Brunello Cucinelli; dress set from Beladora; brooch and charm (worn as brooch) by Dezso by Sara Beltrán; scarf (worn as pocket square) from Angels Costumes.

Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.

Stanfield uses an app that forces him to breathe for a few seconds before he can open his phone in the morning.

He spends a lot of time online, researching arcane subjects like the speed of light and German philosophy (he gravitates toward Nietzsche and Schopenhauer) or discovering films he missed, like Yi Yi, the “gorgeous” 2000 Taiwanese film. The internet, he says, can be “terrible,” but it also reminds him that “we’re all kind of living the same experience.”

In acting, as well as in life, he values authenticity. He admires icons like Marlon Brando, Denzel Washington, Johnny Depp, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (especially, he says, in Capote), but he also gets inspiration from actors he’s worked with closely—like James McAvoy, with whom he costarred in The Book of Clarence. One of his favorite people to watch isn’t an actor at all but his own younger brother, who suffers from severe autism. “He doesn’t really speak English, but he communicates in so many ways, in his gesticulations and expressions and the way he moves,” Stanfield says. “He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever seen because he’s nothing but 110% authentic all the time. And there’s a certain freedom in that that I love.”

This year Stanfield brought his peculiar presence to two critically acclaimed films, appearing alongside Channing Tatum in Roofman and with Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love. Next year he will star in a new Boots Riley movie, I Love Boosters. He won’t reveal much about it, only saying that it’s “one of the craziest things I’ve ever played. It’s like the most fun I think that I’ve had since Sorry to Bother You.”

Looking ahead, he’s hungry for more complex and riskier roles. He’d love to play a “well-written villain,” he says, like Heath Ledger’s in The Dark Knight or Bryan Cranston’s in Breaking Bad. Says Stanfield: “I love a cunning character that’s always plotting on something that other people don’t really know he’s plotting.”

We’ve noticed.

Set Design Julia Wagner; DP Shane Sigler; Barber Kevin Duke; Groomer Tasha Reiko Brown; Manicurist Emi Kudo; Produced by Connect the Dots. For details, go to VF.com/credits.