The New Normal

These 10 young actors are just like us! (except for the whole fast-track-to-superstardom thing.)

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Lakeith Stanfield knows how to hustle. Before he became one of Hollywood’s most thrilling young actors, he was a master salesman, peddling AT&T packages door-to-door in Sacramento, California. “It was basically a form of acting, so I did pretty well at it,” he says. And had it not been for a couple of weed-related warrants that cut short his career, who knows, Stanfield might still be in Sacramento, living life in AT&T’s executive branch.

Instead, the 25-year-old has been stockpiling credits in some of the buzziest projects of the past few years, from his Independent Spirit Award nominated breakout performance in Short Term 12 to his scene-stealing cameo in the horror sensation Get Out, along with roles in Selma, Straight Outta Compton (as a young Snoop Dogg), and FX’s zeitgeisty comedy Atlanta.

And to think, it almost didn’t happen. “He couldn’t find me,” Stanfield says of his Short Term 12 director Destin Daniel Cretton, who had to seek out Stanfield to tell him that a feature-length version of the short film they had shot together was in the works. “I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have an internet presence. I was broke as hell.”