LaKeith Stanfield names his favourite movies of all time
It’s only been a decade since LaKeith Stanfield made his feature film debut by reprising his role from Destin Daniel Cretton’s short film Short Term 12 in its feature-length expansion. Still, he’s already gone on to build a body of work comparable to any performer in the industry.
Gaining strong notices for Selma in 2014, Stanfield would then display his boundless versatility by playing Snoop Dogg in Straight Outta Compton, unsettle in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, captivate in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, playoff Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in Knives Out, and land an Academy Award nomination as ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for Judas and the Black Messiah.
Sadly, even he couldn’t save Disney’s dismal Haunted Mansion reboot. Though the movie wasn’t on his shoulders, considering the star-studded cast, the supernatural fantasy struggled to shake off its inessential nature from the very beginning.
Jeymes Samuels’ acclaimed Netflix original The Harder They Fall did open the doors to a new creative partnership, though, with Stanfield reuniting with the filmmaker for The Book of Clarence. Whereas their first film deconstructed the western, their second has already generated controversy in certain quarters for poking fun at organised religion.
Stanfield plays the title character in A.D. 33 Jerusalem, who looks on at Jesus Christ, gaining attention by proclaiming himself to be a messenger sent from above to get in on the messianic action. It’s a prickly subject matter without a doubt, but it has already been named one of the star’s favourite movies ever.
When settling on his candidates after being pressed by Letterboxd, Stanfield acknowledged the elephant in the room, but justified his decision: “I hate to say it because I’m in it, but I love to say it because it’s the truth,” he reasoned. “This film is really, really special, and I think it’s the start of something very beautiful and inspiring for us to continue to explore in cinema.”
That’s not why The Lion King makes the cut, with Stanfield instead remembering how “growing up, it was one of the first movies I saw on VHS”. Paul Haggis’ Crash may have proven to be a hugely contentious winner of the Oscar for ‘Best Picture’, but in his eyes “that was a movie that was real pivotal at the time it came out for me.”
Allen and Albert Hughes’ Menace II Society was praised for being “a snapshot of life that we don’t really see a lot,” with the sibling filmmakers capturing attention through their unflinching look at teenage life in Los Angeles, following Tyrin Turner’s Caine Lawson as he attempts to break out of the endless cycle of criminality and gang violence that’s affected everyone around him.
An animated classic, sacrilegious comic caper, street-level drama, and the film regularly named as being one of the least deserving ‘Best Picture’ winners in history is an eclectic line-up, but nonetheless indicative of Stanfield’s trajectory as a creative mind.
