How two animated Disney classics inspired LaKeith Stanfield to greatness
Few young actors plying their trade in Hollywood today can boast a filmography as fascinating as LaKeith Stanfield. The 34-year-old star first came to fame playing Snoop Dogg in Straight Outta Compton before becoming a standout member of Donald Glover’s Atlanta.
That show catapulted Stanfield into a series of eye-catching supporting roles in Get Out, Uncut Gems, and Knives Out, before he won the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar for his compellingly ambiguous turn in Judas and the Black Messiah.
Following this big win, it was perhaps expected that Stanfield would follow most of his contemporaries into big-budget blockbuster territory, but aside from a lead role in Disney’s Haunted Mansion remake, he has continued to work primarily in original and/or indie productions.
Stanfield’s eschewing of the intellectual property-fuelled roles so coveted by most of his peers is unusual in this day and age. However, when you dig into his background and discover the two movies he says had the most significant effect on his childhood, it makes a lot more sense why he would be inclined to sign up for a Disney movie like Haunted Mansion.
In 2021, not long before the release of Judas, Stanfield was interviewed by W magazine and asked if he had a favourite film when he was growing up. Without hesitation, he replied, “I loved The Lion King. My aunt assigned us all characters in it, and she made me Simba. I loved it—I was like, ‘I’m Simba, and he’s going to be king!'” Amusingly, the young boy didn’t always want to be Simba, the king in waiting. Instead, he had visions of playing another character: the terrifying Scar. “Jeremy Irons is so good at playing the villain, and he’s skinny like me,” Stanfield chuckled.
The actor’s deep, abiding affection for the 1994 animated classic also extended to Jon Favreau’s 2019 CGI-fueled remake, which was largely dismissed as yet another example of Hollywood creativity circling the drain. Not for Stanfield, though. “I just took my baby to see the newer one with the crazy graphics,” he revealed, adding, “I was crying, and my baby was looking at me like, ‘Why are you crying?’ And I was like, ‘I just love this movie. And it’s so cool that you get to see it how I saw it when I was little’.”
Two years before this interview, Stanfield claimed that another beloved Disney animation was actually his favourite movie, and this one brought out the performer in him. While coming of age in Riverside and Victorville, California, his aunt, who clearly recognised the burgeoning actor within her nephew, would lend him her wigs, which allowed him to play-act and perform puppet shows for the family at dinner time.
At many of these dinners, the family would beg Stanfield to do his “British accent” as part of his performance. So, he would dutifully adopt the accent he, with his limited frame of reference, recognised as the most British of all: Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians, his (other) favourite movie.
He would talk like the villainous Cruella to his family’s delight, pretending to drink tea with his pinkie finger sticking out proudly. “We viewed British people as very high class,” he smiled, “the exact opposite of what we were”.
All in all, while it’s true there isn’t much trace of either The Lion King or 101 Dalmatians in Stanfield’s eccentric, unusual acting style, every actor has to start somewhere, and those beloved childhood films undoubtedly kick-started his particular journey to greatness.
