Here in New York, where he is filming Taylor Sheridan’s upcoming thriller, F.A.S.T., Stanfield seems ready to go off script yet again—as a confessional, emotionally open, and deeply inquisitive actor working to balance leading man ambitions with his relatively new role as a husband and father. Stanfield has three children, including a new baby by wife Kasmere Trice, and has gone through extensive therapy to adjust to life as a rising star, especially after his Oscar-nominated performance in Judas and the Black Messiah. “I have tried to stifle my emotions before, for reasons of survivability, but I don’t think that that’s me,” he says. “I think that I am a person who feels a lot of things, and I think that’s okay. I think I have to allow myself to do that. And I think that part of my authenticity is just to feel. And to share.”
Stanfield’s tattooed arms are a reminder of how far he’s come. One of his more recent additions—the letter A on his right arm—was done while filming Atlanta, but most were made by “a gangster dude who lived around the corner from my house” in the hardscrabble suburb of Victorville, California, where he grew up. The first one, which cost him $5, was his mother’s name, Karen, with the phrase “True Love of My Life.” Stanfield’s mother raised him and his two brothers on a salary from fast-food restaurants, and his choice of tribute to her was calculated to mitigate her disapproval. “And then once I got away with that one,” he says, “I got, like, tat fever.” (His latest ink: the word Magnolia over his right eyebrow, which is both the street he grew up on and the name of his daughter.)
Stanfield’s early impressions of acting came from seeing Larenz Tate in Menace II Society and Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love. But he also loved comic stars like Robin Williams and especially Jim Carrey, whose rubber-faced transformations on the TV show In Living Color were an early influence. “I was like, I want to be like that,” he says.
Stanfield joined the drama club in high school, signed to a modeling agency, and landed his first significant role in 2013, in an indie film called Short Term 12, which saw him costar with Rami Malek. Finding his way in Hollywood wasn’t easy. A rap single he released this year, “Fast Life,” was written during his first brush with fame after Get Out, when he was overindulging in alcohol and surrounding himself with hangers-on. “I had a bunch of people around me, doing all their different vices,” he recalls. “And I’m drinking and I’m like, Good drugs and friends,” which became a repeated lyric. In retrospect, “none of those people were actually my friends,” he says. “When you’re not primed and mature and don’t have the strength yet to navigate it, it can be all-encompassing and consuming. So I had a lot to learn when I wrote that song.”
