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
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 multi million-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.
This story is from the August 2018 edition of Playboy South Africa.
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This story is from the August 2018 edition of Playboy South Africa.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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