LaKeith Stanfield

LaKeith Stanfield's first feature was Short Term 12, a low-budget film about a group home for teenagers, and it earned him an Independent Spirit nomination. Watch the scene where his character raps and the whole career is visible in advance: total commitment, no protective irony, and a sense that he is standing slightly to the left of the room everyone else is in.

That displacement is the thing he does better than almost anyone. Darius in Atlanta answers conversations half a second late and from an angle nobody anticipated. Cassius Green in Sorry to Bother You is a man losing himself inside a job, and the satire only functions because Stanfield plays each compromise as ordinary. Andre in the opening of Get Out has about four minutes and sets the temperature of a whole horror classic. He tends to be the strangest and most interesting person on screen, and he does it with no visible effort.

Judas and the Black Messiah gave him the largest role of his career, an informant with no comfortable position available anywhere in the story, and it brought an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor. The run since has been less certain, with studio pictures and a couple of series that use his oddness as decoration rather than material. The best of him is still in the films where a director trusted him to be difficult.