Lakeith Stanfield: ‘I don’t hold anything back’
To spread the word about his anarchic, brilliantly batshit 2018 comedy Sorry to Bother You, the actor Lakeith Stanfield adopted an anarchic, brilliantly batshit strategy. He went to one of his favourite stores, Iguana Vintage Clothing, in Los Angeles, and cleared out every wig they had. Then he drove around cinemas in Hollywood, bought tickets for the film, stashed them inside the wigs, and hid them outside the cinemas.
“Then people engaged in it, on a wild goose hunt,” explains Stanfield, his voice deep and languid. “There’s a lost art in being able to have fun with a film in the release. But it was a film that I thought was fun, right? So I wanted to have fun, and I wanted people to engage in that fun with me. Also I loved the movie so much, I wanted people to see it for free.”
For many actors, an off-book stunt like this would be eccentric, even subversive. For Stanfield, it doesn’t even warrant a raised eyebrow; both on screen and off, he is known for his uncanny knack to provoke and confound. These qualities have been put to especially good effect in Jordan Peele’s comic horror flick Get Out, as a detective in the 2019 whodunnit Knives Out, and in Donald Glover’s TV series Atlanta, in which he plays the oddball stoner Darius. In Boots Riley’sSorry to Bother You, he is Cassius Green, a black telesales agent who becomes successful only when he adopts a “white voice” – a trippy idea to which Stanfield somehow brings a mesmerising pathos. The New York Times has called Stanfield “the new symbol of Hollywood weird”; in GQ, he was “the king of cinematic surrealism”.
Stanfield doesn’t leave the performative exuberance on the screen. He has attended premieres of his films in, on different occasions, a chainmail shirt, a balaclava, and a rainbow suit and green wig (also from Iguana). At the 2017 Emmy Awards, he sat down on the red carpet in a silent, never-explained protest. On Twitter, Stanfield once posted his phone number and the message: “I wanna say Hi to some of you guys.” This was followed, shortly after, with: “Whoa. That was a really bad idea.”
Stanfield, a 29-year-old Californian,