Glancing around at his surroundings, it isn’t hard to see why LaKeith Stanfield might, as he puts it, ‘feel adrift in history’. We’re sitting on wooden chairs in a cottage on the grounds of a Pasadena hotel that dates back to the Gilded Age. Stanfield has been living here for the past few weeks while he remodels his nearby home to mimic its rustic aesthetic: exposed oak beams, heavy velvet curtains, wrought iron pokers beside the fireplace. ‘I like feeling like I’m in a different time,’ he says. ‘That’s how this hotel makes me feel.’ It is, he says, his hideaway from the modern world. ‘I’m trying to find a hole and stay there,’ he smiles. ‘Especially these days, I’m really enjoying the things that matter, like family. Building my family and having those moments of sacredness is really important.’
Let’s bear with him for a moment, shall we? ‘I don’t know if it’s start-middle-end,’ he muses, his voice low and languid. ‘I view it as a revolution in a circle, a neverending loop.’ The 31-year-old (at least by conventional calendars) found himself pondering this concept on the set of his spooky new Disney movie, Haunted Mansion. ‘If you think about it like that, technically we’re ghosts,’ he continues. ‘The question is: do you want to be a good ghost or a bad ghost? You’re in someone’s dream right now, and you’re either haunting it or making it more pleasurable. My thing is: let’s make people’s dreams a little bit more fun and cooler, make them feel good if we can.’
Over the past decade Stanfield has established himself as the most compelling, charismatic and idiosyncratic actor of his generation. His lethargic charisma is endlessly malleable, allowing him to drift through time to play an Old West outlaw in The Harder They Fall or a 1960s FBI informant in Judas and the Black Messiah (earning an Oscar nomination in the process). He is best known, though, as the otherworldly Darius, who spent four seasons of Atlanta as the trippiest, most heartfelt character on television.
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 