It's two hours past call time and LaKeith Stanfield still hasn't shown up for the cover shoot. His absence has engendered a slightly anxious mood on set. Walkie-talkies crackle. The crew paces back and forth under the hot sun. Rattlesnakes forage in the dry chaparral. Everyone seems a little on edge and, geographically speaking, they are. From 2,000 feet above Malibu, perched at the summit of the dry hill-scape, the sky out over the city blends seamlessly with the Pacific Ocean, to the point where it's difficult to tell one from the other in the vast expanse of blue. There is the sense that you've arrived at the world's outer limit — or at least the end of California. It doesn't seem irrational to wonder if, by now, Stanfield has grown tired of the weathering demands of celebrity: the endless procession of reporters, the fans interrupting dinners with weed offerings or impressions of his characters, the ambient expectation that he should always be available to entertain.
The truth is that Stanfield hasn't been outside the public's sphere of attention since he found his way into it ten years ago, as a 21-year-old off-the-radar newcomer from San Bernardino, California, who didn't own a cell phone and had been most recently employed at a weed grow house. His first role was that of an emotionally volatile kid about to age out of a group home for at-risk teens, in a thesis film-turned-small budget feature called Short Term 12. Theories abound that the movie is charmed; its lead actors Rami Malek and Brie Larson are big names now. But it was Stanfield, playing Marcus, who left the most lasting impression. He dissolves into his characters; sometimes it seems more like he's transcribing his own moods than reciting lines. The wounded sensitivity he brought to the role was so internalised that, when Marcus burst into tears after shaving his head and finding no scars left over from his mother's abuse, Larson “had to excuse myself from the scene and cry”. The breakdown hadn't been in the script.
Just a few years later and his resumé had become so long it could have the same effect on most actors his age. He has been a civil rights activist (Selma), a computer genius (Snowden), a man imprisoned for a murder he didn't commit (Crown Heights), a prodigious musician with a heroin addiction (Miles Ahead), a pseudo-philosophical conspiracy theorist with a weed addiction (Atlanta), a Black
