LaKeith Stanfield on Atlanta Season 3, Getting Sober, and Mastering Hollywood

LaKeith Stanfield is breaking a promise he made to himself. He grew up in Victorville, a sleepy desert city about 90 minutes outside Los Angeles, and when he left a decade ago he told himself he wouldn’t look back, only forward, toward better opportunities and a promising career. But circumstances have changed. Stanfield has become perhaps the preeminent character actor of his generation, but he’s also in the midst of a self-proclaimed metamorphosis—and, well, all roads eventually lead home.

“I had to come home because I didn’t want to,” Stanfield explains. “Coming back home is part of a ritual—checking in with yourself, going back to where things started, starting over and becoming a new you. So the old you is effectively dead.” He’s in a new headspace these days, making major changes as he plots the next phase of his career—and his life. So here’s Almost New LaKeith, back in Victorville, reliving the formative experiences that made him into the certified star he is now. “Once you leave, see the world, and come back, you really start to appreciate [where you came from] more,” Stanfield says.

He takes gleeful laps around the roller rink where kids still gather on Friday nights. He gives a gawky preteen a zip around the parking lot in his Lamborghini Aventador, and he reconnects with his high school drama teacher. When he’s appeared in public recently, it’s often been with a weary, skeptical look on his face—but today, he can’t quite stop smiling.

He was hopeful when he first left Victorville, but it’s hard to imagine that Stanfield could have expected this. No two LaKeith roles are the same—he has a magnetic, lethargic charm that masks a simmering intensity, giving him the range to toggle between cool romantic heartthrob and shifty scumbag. He has the screen presence to shine in a formidable ensemble (The Harder They Fall), and to transform a two-scene role into a film’s iconic moment (Get Out). And as of last year, he’s an Oscar nominee. Soon, he’ll step up to a lead role in an honest-to-goodness blockbuster: Haunted Mansion, based on the popular Disneyland ride.

But as Stanfield’s star climbs, he’s still most closely identified with his role on Atlanta. Donald Glover’s FX series finally returns from an excruciating four-year hiatus with its third season on March 24. The show—sometimes intense and dramatic, other times riotously funny, always surreal—is rangy, and Stanfield’s Darius Epps is the character most representative of that range. The same can be said of Stanfield himself. Stanfield has said that Glover offered him the part of Darius, the oddball third-eye-open stoner, on the spot after he observed Stanfield dancing at a party like no one was watching. Since then, Stanfield has doubled down on moving at his own rhythm, occasionally synchronizing with the industry when it suits him. He insists on doing things his way, refusing to adhere to the Hollywood blueprint. It keeps everything around him exciting, from his filmography to his late-night appearances.

At this point, Stanfield’s reputation for impish trolling precedes him. He has taken a cross-legged seated siesta on one red carpet because he was tired, worn chain mail to another, and shown up barefoot to tape a show called Sneaker Shopping. He’s parlayed that energy into signal-boosting social issues whenever he can—one time, shortly after the Ahmaud Arbery video was released, he would only agree to an interview if it was conducted after jogging through an affluent Los Angeles suburb. He’s also found himself at the center of a few contentious controversies. But it’s all part of the way he sees the world. “The couple times I’ve sat down on [a red] carpet, I was genuinely tired,” he reasons. “To be honest, when I’m put in these situations like interviews, photo shoots, I do what makes it fun for me; otherwise it’s banal and inane, and I don’t feel like sitting through that bullshit. You have to do it your way, otherwise you get ran by this business and people always telling you who you need to be, pushing you in all these fucking directions. No, I’m going to do what I want to do for me, and take it or leave it, man. I’m not going to be where you need me to be.” But while Stanfield has spent the past decade finding ways to subvert our ideas about who he is, lately he’s been interested in more earnest self-exploration.

“Right over there,” Stanfield says, pointing excitedly. He’s identified the precise spot in Victorville’s Hook Park, just past the baseball mound, to the right of the basketball courts, where he knew he would become an actor. “Someone was shooting a short film out here, and we don’t get that a lot, so I was excited. They asked for volunteers and my arm immediately shot up. My first time on camera.” He slips into a reverie, but before he can dwell, another memory crowds in: A memorable high school fistfight occurred a few yards away. (“Over a girl. Always over a girl.”)

Cute hangouts like the roller rink notwithstanding, it’s easy to see how the flat Anytown USA–ness of Victorville might breed boredom. (On our tour through town, someone outside of a Holiday Inn remarked that something big must be going down today, because “there’s never this many other Black people around.”) “Victorville seems like a desert where nothing’s happening,” Stanfield explains. “But, to be honest, there’s an underworld here that people don’t really know about. There’s a lot of violence, there’s a lot of hurt, there’s a lot of pain, and there’s a lot of isolation in a place like this.” As his high school friend Hernando puts it as we walk through their old campus: “If you ain’t humble coming from here, man, you ain’t you.”

Stanfield used that desert isolation to foster his creativity. He credits 1993’s Menace II Society and “all the hood movies from that time” with sparking his inspiration. “I’d walk through these desert plains and come up with scripts, stories, characters, ideas. And it was just me talking to the ether, talking to God, and nothing else to get in the way of that. I’m making comic book strips in my head, all kinds of stuff.” While visiting his high school, Stanfield meets up with his former drama teacher, who shares her first impression of him: “I still remember the first day you came to class. I was like, You have the voice for Shakespeare. But I also remember you were shy, [sitting in the back] trying not to make eye contact.”

If boredom helped nurture Stanfield’s creativity, it also created challenges. Pointedly, Michael’s Market & Liquor was number one on his list of old Victorville haunts to revisit. Last fall, in a since-deleted Instagram post promoting The Harder They Fall, Stanfield alluded to the “crippling anxiety” he struggled with while making the film in 2020. It was during that shoot, he tells me, that he came to understand that he had an alcohol addiction. “This is something I never really had talked about before, but I think it’s something that I need to talk about, because I want people to understand that it’s something that you can get through, that it’s something that you can get past,” he says. “And I want people to feel empowered by the fact that the person they’re looking at on that screen has gone through addiction and survived it.”

Around that same time, he realized something was off while getting a massage. “All of a sudden, I got so anxious during it that I just got up, canceled the massage, and told [the masseuse] to leave. And she was probably like, What the hell is going on? And I didn’t really know what was happening either,” he recalls. “I just thought, I’m anxious, let me just drink some wine. As soon as I drink the wine, the anxiety goes away.”

Then, he thought it was just anxiety—the stress of making a movie coupled with that of living through a pandemic. With time, though, Stanfield came to believe that he was experiencing what he calls the “onset of alcohol withdrawal. I had become completely dependent upon it. To the point where I wasn’t able to move or function a whole day without having it.”

He went to rehab and eventually found guidance and support from peers like Paris Jackson and Jamie Lee Curtis. Stanfield and Curtis first met while making Knives Out in 2018; despite not sharing many scenes together, their first interaction, which came when Stanfield took a cigarette break, was charged. “I probably said something to the effect of ‘You’re a gorgeous, talented, smart, young father with huge opportunities ahead of you: Don’t fuck it up by dying of cancer that you can prevent,’” she recalls, laughing. They both wept. Stanfield quit smoking.

They established a strong enough connection for Curtis, who’s had her own battles with addiction, to reach out to Stanfield last year after hearing from a mutual friend that he was thinking about sobriety. “My experience is that when you feel you are alone, that’s a very scary feeling,” Curtis says. “So what I was trying to say to him was, ‘You are not alone. And if I can be a source of comfort or understanding, then I hope you will allow me to do that.’” He did, with the two of them exchanging texts and calls as he continued to work. One moment sticks with him. “She asked me, ‘How old are you?’” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Uh, about to be 30.’ And she said, ‘No, how old are you from when you became sober?’” He replied: “‘Oh, I’m about seven months.’ And she goes, ‘You’re seven months old. I am 23 years old.’”

Atlanta last aired way back in 2018, by which point it had already solidified Donald Glover as a bona fide auteur, entered the one-of-the-greatest-shows-ever conversation on the strength of just two audacious seasons, and made stars of the rest of the cast. Season three picks up where the season-two finale left off, with the central characters heading to Europe, but production found its cast and crew in decidedly different places in their lives. Filming was on location, and Stanfield traveled on Air Gambino: “I flew out with Donald, and he basically has a jumbo-air airplane that is his own personal—I don’t know if he owns it or what, but the motherfucker’s big and there were three levels, and it was only me, him, and Brian [Tyree Henry] on it.”

Stanfield is mum on what season three holds for Darius, much less what comes after, but promises this run (a fourth and final season is slated to air later this year) will be well worth the wait. “You all got a lot of shit coming in your direction,” he says. “Now it’s the Blackest, the most surreal, the most hilarious. I say this shit with no fear, because I already know what it’s going to be: the most unexpected thing you have ever seen. But the truth is, it’s becoming hard to make shit up, because the actual reality is crazier than the shit you could come up with. But, luckily, we have a team of dedicated writers who are intent on creating things that are interesting and funny and particularly Black.”

That unexpectedness extends to the way he plays the character. “For Darius, a lot of it is just letting me riff,” Stanfield reveals. “They set up a circumstance, say ‘Go,’ and then I just start doing shit. I use the script as more of a guidance thing than literally saying every word. Because of the way that the character’s designed, I can do anything. I can come into the scene floating. I can come into the scene bowing. I can walk, run, or jump into the scene, or just lay down on my side. Whatever I want to do, it fits with what Darius would do, because he would do anything.”

It’s all but certain that Darius will have his standout moments this season—which are, in their own way, challenging for the guy who plays him. “It’s nice to know that a lot of people think that Darius is their favorite character—I love the enthusiasm,” Stanfield says. “But for LaKeith, I’d rather not even have that kind of attention. I’d rather just be strictly on the show.” Maybe that’s because so far, the spotlight has afforded him his fair share of scrutiny. Last May, Stanfield found himself in the awkward position of having to clarify that he is not antisemitic after, as he tells it, wandering into a Clubhouse chat room and being made a moderator before grasping where the conversation was going. (It was going nowhere good.) He wound up in the spotlight again not long after, writing in an Instagram post a few months later that “no one should be forcing anyone to put anything in their body,” which was taken as anti-vax sentiment.

Stanfield is wary of discussing those incidents again, particularly because he feels that people were quicker to believe gossipy headlines than what he says is the truth. One day your eccentricity is a charming quirk, the next it’s shorthand for bad behavior. “I think the main takeaway is that I need to be careful about what I say and what I put out, because there is such weight surrounding my words now, and people can take them out of context,” he says, growing animated. “It doesn’t matter if it’s completely false. The fact that it’s there and in the ether affects my career. It affects me as a human being, being perceived the wrong way. And I don’t really care too much about what nobody thinks, but I don’t like when motherfuckers got me fucked up. You feel me?”

A few years ago, Stanfield might not have cared about internet backlash. But the New LaKeith has a vested interest in playing the game his way, rather than eschewing it completely. “I need to move smarter, I need to watch what I say, I need to be more strategic,” he says. “There are things that I feel strongly about, and I need to find ways that are more creative and artistic to get those points across.”

With that in mind, the next challenge is to make movies like the ones that inspired him. “I felt connected to that struggle: knowing what it’s like to be poor and be in a situation with the homies, just trying to make it through another day,” he says. “We need more of that, but motherfuckers got to be real. People want to make movies, but they don’t want to be real. All this shit watered down. They got to go hard again. We got to make some more hood movies. I’m going to make some. I’m working on a show right now.” There’s one rule, he says: “It’s got to be real. If it ain’t real, fuck it.” And he isn’t limiting himself to film and television: His long-gestating album—he records as Htiekal, his first name backwards—is finally close to completion, and as all things LaKeith, it defies easy genre categorization. There’s also Three Dead Crows, a “multimedia structure” (“I hesitate to call it a company,” he says) that he started with a few friends, the ambitions for which are too big to limit to a single industry, or adjective even. “Essentially, it is a company, but it’s [more of] an entity that we don’t have a word for yet,” he says.

And while he’s acting in bigger projects than ever, he says he’s learning more about himself by “what I say no to.” He reasons: “Money’s cool. But now let’s do some real shit. Every single movie you’ve ever seen me in is one for them, one for me. Let me put myself in a position to build up my own empire. So that one day maybe I might be like the next Disney.”

That will all come later. For now, his visit home deemed a success, he has someone he needs to see. “My mom lives right around the corner,” he explains. “She just asked me to come over. I never really want to.” But the New LaKeith runs toward the things he doesn’t want to do. “So I said, ‘Today I’m going to challenge that,’” he says. “I’m going to go see her right after this.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Michael Schmelling
Styled by Julie Ragolia
Grooming by Simone for Exclusive Artists using BOY DE CHANEL / Kevin Murphy
Special thanks to Holiday Skating Center