“Say Something That’s Worth Something”: LaKeith Stanfield on ‘I Love Boosters’ and His Chameleonic Career

I first met LaKeith Stanfield in 2018, when I was enlisted to write a short profile of him for AmericanVogue. After making a name for himself as a laconic scene-stealer in films such as Short Term 12, Get Out, and as a central player in Donald Glover’s critically beloved television series Atlanta, the 26-year-old had finally been given a starring role. The film was Sorry to Bother You, a radical black comedy from musician turned writer-director Boots Riley, and it had taken that year’s Sundance Film Festival by storm. Familiar, by then, with both Hollywood’s machinations and their deleterious effects on a young actor’s developing brain, I remember hoping, as I waited on an unprepossessing Brooklyn street to meet him, that the star on the rise wouldn’t be too enraptured by his own ego (or too handled by his team of publicists and managers) to be a good interview.

Then Stanfield appeared, loping down the street, unfettered by any representative. He invited me into his nearby rental apartment, and proceeded, in the generous manner of a university student having a deep-and-meaningful, to unfurl his thoughts and feelings in his living room: about art and his pursuit of it; his early beginnings in rural California as a young person who felt like energy was just bursting out of his skin (“like I was much more than what was confined in this body”); his take on the then unprecedented times we were living through (unfortunately, these have since become a precedent). He was what you would call “a good hang”: curious and open in conversation, seemingly unaffected by the buzz around his career. He was both interesting and interested, if not always particularly easy to follow. Most important for my purposes, he was not a total jerk, or even a partial one.

So when Esquire asked if I wanted to talk to him now, on the cusp of his reunion with Riley for the director’s much-anticipated second film, I Love Boosters, I wondered: eight years, countless achievements (a burgeoning music career, one Oscar nomination) and life developments (including three kids and a marriage, to the mother of the third, model Kasmere Trice in 2023), was that still true?

Short answer? Yes.

Esquire

In January, Stanfield arrived on Esquire’s Los Angeles set – a peculiarly small, largely abandoned residential development with a view of an oil refinery in the city’s southwesternmost tip – much like he had on that Brooklyn street corner: solo. No publicist, no manager, no entourage. This is so unusual in this context that at first some of the team mistook him for an interloper. (“I was like, wait, is that him?” one crew member told me.) Stanfield, known for his adventurous personal style, was game for the clothes: when I arrived, he was being photographed in a bus-stop shelter wearing oversized floral print shorts, brandishing a pair of ski poles like a pair of swords.

“LaKeith has an energy that feels both spontaneous and composed,” Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Dior, wrote in an email to me. “He’s an actor’s actor, with a remarkable range, bringing something unexpected and magical to every role.” Later, as the sun set, Stanfield held up an enormous clock in the gloaming, Alice’s white rabbit style, for the final shot.

“In every character, you find parts of you,” Stanfield tells me as we sit down near the complex’s empty outdoor swimming pool as the team pack up. “You’re either unlocking and bringing to the surface parts of you that maybe lie dormant, or you’re stretching parts of you to come to understand another point of view… there isn’t anything that isn’t you.”

Stanfield seems uncalcified by the intervening years since our first interview. He tells me he isn’t sure he’d be alive if he hadn’t been able to act. “I wanted to perform and I knew I was going to somehow. I had no doubt. And I think that you can’t really have doubt. I think you’ve got to know that there’s no other option.” You need ambition, he says, the kind that’s bordering on delusion. “Like, I’ve got to run through that door. I’ve just got to get through it. And I know that I will. I know that I already have it.”

He could see it – even in those early years when he was trying desperately to break into acting, couch surfing and at one point living in his car, he could picture everything. “I was like, I’m going to have a house. I’m going to have a wife. I’m going to have dogs. It’s going to be all those things. And for some reason I believed it.”

MICAIAH CARTER

Jacket, £7,500; shirt, £1,100; both Dior

Stanfield is currently three days into a personal-improvement regimen called 75 Hard. The programme consists of 75 days of five non-negotiable daily rules: follow a strict diet, complete two 45-minute workouts (one outside), drink a gallon of water, read 10 pages of nonfiction, and take a progress picture. He’s made some adjustments, he says, like adding in an additional 10 pages of fiction per day. It is less about the physical results for him than it is about discipline, he adds. He’s been inspired by the new year and its rush of resolutions: he believes in the stars and their cycles, that timing matters. He is a Leo, and says he recognises in himself many of that star sign’s traits. (“That totally tracks: confident, creative, charismatic… basically always on stage,” an astrologer friend tells me later.)

Now that Stanfield has gotten with his programme, he isn’t finding himself reaching for his phone until a few hours into the day: instead of being inundated with the cortisol-spiking news cycle, he has time alone with his own thoughts in the morning. “Negativity seems to win,” in terms of what sticks in the mind, he says. “You’ve got to make a conscious effort to save your own grace, save your peace: take a piece of you, put it in a safe, and then don’t let it be touched by the influx of information that we’re getting.” He turns to thank the production assistant who returns his beaded crystal bracelets, an exterior effort at this same protection from bad energy. The actor looks up with a shrug as he slides on one made of evil eye beads. “I’m trying to put more good in so more good can come out.”

MICAIAH CARTER

Shirt, £5,900; trousers, £980; mules, £850, all Dior

Good that’s newly come out: I Love Boosters. Boots Riley’s sophomore effort is a radical romp and a total blast. It stars Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige and Naomi Ackie as shoplifters reselling the stolen goods in a psychedelic/sci-fi take on contemporary Oakland, with Demi Moore as a fashion designer turned craven capitalist foil. Stanfield’s role – an otherworldly romantic interest for Palmer, and yes, I’m being intentionally vague here – is far smaller than his central role in Sorry to Bother You, but it is definitely one that people will be talking about when they leave the cinema. “I can promise you’ve never seen anything like it before,” Stanfield tells me. (Without spoiling anything, and I must insist you stay unspoiled if you can, I can confirm that has to be true.)

I called Riley to ask what it was like to work with Stanfield again. “I’m going to have him in everything I ever do as long as he’ll have me,” the director told me. This is partly because he likes him so much, but mostly because he’s just so good. “I think a lot of actors stop themselves and think about the character as someone other than himself,” Riley said. “What’s so good about LaKeith is he is just feeling the thing and doing the thing and not thinking about whether he looks like he’s feeling the thing. He just feels it.”

There’s no judgement, no hesitation, no walls between him and whomever he’s embodying, even if that someone is a jealous contemporary of Jesus (The Book of Clarence), or an FBI informant snitching on the Black Panthers (Judas and the Black Messiah), or a telemarketer that capitalism turns into a horse-person (Sorry to Bother You). Stanfield is right there in the humanity of the role, the “what would I do if this was me?” Because in his mind, it could’ve been.

MICAIAH CARTER

Top, £1,050; jeans, £950; tie, £220; belt, £440;mules, £1,150, all Dior

Sometimes he’ll spend all this time studiously preparing for a part, Stanfield told me, trying to nail down the character’s physicality, making playlists and journalling, and then he’ll see someone’s posture on a passing bus, or hear a stranger’s laugh, and boom: that’s it. “Some of it, there’s a method to the madness and some of it, there’s not,” he says. So it’s like… magic? “Yeah. So I guess it’s like methodical magic. Or magical method. Either or.”

“LaKeith understands a thing that is key: that you can never know it all, you can never figure it out, even within one room, you can constantly learn millions of things about what’s around you,” Riley told me. “That openness, that curiosity, that excitement about life, even if that excitement means being sad for something, that’s what audiences connect to.”

This openness to the random quirks and vicissitudes of the universe has also made room for another manner of expression: music. Stanfield writes songs as a way of working through his emotions and is rarely far from his guitar. (It was with him on Esquire’s set, in case he had time to noodle.) He put out an album, Do Better, in 2022, as Htiekal (LaKeith backwards), and in 2025, he signed with Def Jam and released a single, “Fast Life” with Kid Cudi. “I’ve just always loved words,” Stanfield tells me. “Now I can find a way to put them into something that says maybe what I can’t always say.”

I called Kid Cudi to ask if he was surprised when he learned that Stanfield wanted to make music with him. “Yeah, I was surprised,” Cudi says, laughing. “I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ When they first told me, I was like, LaKeith Stanfield, the actor?” Cudi prepared himself for the worst, he says, reasoning that if Stanfield’s track sucked, he would just ghost. “Because a lot of people do ask me to hear that shit, and it don’t be hitting. And when I heard it, I was like, fuck. I heard the freedom in him as an artist that a lot of people do not have. He was just focused on making some dope shit.”

MICAIAH CARTER

Jacket, £2,800; shirt, £790; jeans, £950; belt, £440, all Dior

They connected on past struggles, says Cudi (both have said that they became sober from alcohol in recent years), and found their journeys very similar. “I mean, the best actors are people who have been through shit, right?” Cudi tells me. “He’s lived a life. And he stayed grounded throughout this whole ordeal with becoming famous and being in the limelight. That’s half the battle. A lot of people lose themselves.”

In person, Stanfield speaks typically obscurely about those challenges (at one point referring to “the microcosm of the macro, or the macro of the micro,” and I’ve reviewed the transcript so many times but I’m still not sure what he was getting at). In a culture that expects unlimited access and transparency from celebrities, he is clearly invested in protecting his and his family’s privacy.

It’s in his lyrics that he feels far more accessible. “It can feel cathartic,” he says of making music. “The process of doing it, the process of sharing, it always feels good. In the midst and leading up, you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, but then after the fact, you always feel a little bit better, that now you’ve gotten it out.’” (From 2023’s “Do Better”: “Fuck the world, I can’t help nobody else/ lift a hand, nail in palm, I can’t even help myself/ staring at the ceiling/ I got a bad feeling/ it’s another dead day/ wish these walls would waste away.”)

Stanfield wants to keep appearing in movies that make people think and feel, but he wants other things, too: to direct, and to star in an action film with big, choreographed fight scenes, and to keep making music; but also, he wants to leave things a little better than he found them. “What can I do to put something good into the world?” he asks, sounding like he actually wants to hear the answer. “Because I think entertainment’s fine, but I think if you can, say something. Say something that’s worth something.”

“I Love Boosters” is in cinemas on 22 May

Photographs by Micaiah Carter

Styling by Zak Maoui

Grooming by Tayari Edwards

Stylist assistant: Nadiya Mazurczak

Tailor: Hasmik Kourinian

Production designer: Renna Pilar

Production by Petty Cash Productions