Lakeith Stanfield

With festival smash Sorry to Bother You, the enthralling young actor has arrived. Here, he talks aspiration, Atlanta and the truth behind his surreal Oscars cameo

- James Rickman

Q1: Your new movie Sorry to Bother You has some of the most shocking twists in recent memory. Without giving too much away, were you prepared for that when you first got the script?

STANFIELD: No one gave me any warning, which I think is a good way to go into this kind of story — straight in. Once I read it, I was like, “Oh, totally, we have to do this.” It hopped off the page. Normally, to make a movie like this you would need a multimillion-dollar budget. I don’t know what the exact numbers were, but they were pretty low. Sometimes my trailer was a van, you know what I mean? But we found a way to make it happen. We had a vision. Sometimes it’s the best working environment when everyone builds from the trenches together. You can really get on the ground and get dirty.

Q2: Your character, Cassius Green, is a telemarketer who, having learned to use his “white voice,” gets a big promotion that comes with increasingly lavish and weird perks. You’re 26 and have been acting for a decade. In your own career, has it ever felt as though you were leaving behind the people you came up with?

STANFIELD: Yeah. When I first moved to Los Angeles, it was definitely a big shift for me. Certain people around me didn’t understand why I would be trying to pursue this weird job. I had conversations with people very similar to those Cassius has with Detroit [Cassius’s girlfriend, played by Tessa Thompson]. But it hasn’t really started feeling super weird until now. I was in L.A. recently, in my car at a stoplight, and some dude just runs up to my passenger-side window, takes a selfie and runs off. Just selfie, then gone. I was like, Yeah, that’s never happened before. Something is different.