Lakeith Stanfield Is The Greatest Weird Actor Of Our Generation

There’s a scene in the first season of Donald Glover‘s Atlanta that perfectly sums up the compelling oddness of this genre-bending comedy. In “The Club”, Earn (Glover), Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), and Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) all go to a club together, but at one point Darius leaves the group temporarily to go smoke. He tells the VIP section bouncer where he’s going — he tells him it’s OK. However, when Darius returns just a few minutes later, the man he just talked to tells him he can’t go back into the club because he doesn’t have the right wristband. If this was any other show, Darius would pitch a fit or scheme his way back into the section. He would have at least gotten his friend Paper Boi’s attention. Instead, he gives up and leaves.

There’s an effortlessness to this scene that speaks to Darius as a character. He’s a meandering figure who doesn’t seem to really belong anywhere — and so he belongs everywhere. Atlanta embraces his confusing duality wholeheartedly. Consistently the conspiracy theory-obsessed Darius is the most humorous character, but on more than a few occasions he’s also the wisest while being the least driven. If Earn stands as the heart of Atlanta, then Darius is the most unfiltered form of its intentionally disjointed, jarring, and racially barbed sense of humor. But with respect to Donald and Stephen Glover‘s writing as well as Hiro Murai‘s directing, both Darius and Atlanta wouldn’t be as great as they currently are without Lakeith Stanfield.

Stanfield has been an actor on the rise for some time now. Perhaps his best known early role was in Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 as Marcus. Since then, the actor has been in some of the best and most critically-acclaimed films of recent years. He played Jimmie Lee Jackson in Ava DuVernay‘s Selma, Bug in the wonderful Dope, Patrick Haynes in Snowden, the lead in Matt Ruskin’s Crown Heights, and he was the breakout star of Straight Outta Compton for his role as Snoop. No matter what he’s in, Stanfield is a constantly arresting actor. However, time and again Stanfield has proven he’s at his best when he’s pressed to be his weirdest.

What makes Stanfield such a dream in odd roles is his authenticity and commitment. Take perhaps one of Stanfield’s best known modern roles — Andre Logan King in Get Out. Logan is an immensely complicated role. Though the character is only on screen for a few minutes, he’s supposed to immediately communicate that he’s a living nightmare for Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) without directly saying why. He’s able to express true horror, desperation, and secrecy all while sporting a boating hat and acting like an 80-year-old white man. It would be easy for the role of a black man being controlled by a white man to be played too subtly to reveal the deeper horrors of the plot or too aggressively, thereby cheapening the film as a whole. Stanfield, under Jordan Peele‘s direction, handles the terrifying balance perfectly.

However, the biggest testament to Stanfield’s knack for making the best of a bizarre situation is surprisingly Netflix’s Death Note. For all intents and purposes, Adam Wingard‘s adaptation of the Japanese manga is a mess. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie currently has a 41 percent critical score and a shocking 25 percent audience score. But even in this rushed, goth-cheerleader mess of a movie, Stanfield is still great. As I noted in my review of the film, Stanfield’s depiction of the neurotic and too-smart L almost makes the entire movie worth watching. Considering Nat Wolff under Wingard’s direction had about as much charisma as a wet piece of cardboard, that speaks more to Stanfield’s talent and proficiency than anything else.

These roles aren’t weird in the ways that intense sci-fi are weird. They’re always grounded in reality while leaning away from it in an effort to make a larger point. As a result, sometimes Stanfield’s characters can feel emotionally distant, and yet there’s a sharp understanding to them that’s hard for audience members to shake. What sets Stanfield apart seems to be his earnestness. There’s a level of authenticity and an almost humbling belief in the characters he plays that bleeds through the screen. That element is certainly evident in Darius, a character Stanfield recently revealed he didn’t understand in an interview with Vanity Fair. “When I saw all the episodes together, I hated the show,” Stanfield said in Tad Friend’s profile of Donald Glover. “The pacing was strange, there was a lot of space between things, and I didn’t understand Darius. But as I watched it more it began to reveal itself to me.”

And in the coming months, we can only expect to see more of Stanfield’s mastery of the unconventional. Atlanta returns for its second season in early March, and Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley’s well-reviewed sci-fi and fantasy comedy starring Tessa Thompson and Armie Hammer, is set to premiere in late June. In the upcoming film, Stanfield stars as a telemarketer who discovers what it takes to be successful in business as well as the secret as of his corporate overlords in a dystopian world — a role that seems to perfectly capitalize on the actor’s wide-eyed and weird strengths. As Lakeith Stanfield has proven, you can have odd, offbeat roles and characters without transforming them into punchlines. Please give him more, Hollywood.

Stream Atlanta on Hulu