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The LEVEL Man at 30

LaKeith Stanfield Settles Into His Toughest Role Yet: Himself

As he heads towards his thirties, the electrifying actor is laying himself bare — and finding a new sense of balance

LEVEL
Published in
12 min readFeb 12, 2021

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For nearly a decade, LaKeith Stanfield has used his screen time reveling in the bizarreness of America’s racial consciousness. Whether Atlanta’s quippy street mystic Darius, or the code-switching sardonics of Cassius in Sorry to Bother You, his characters have always seemed to be in on the joke — and in his latest, Judas and the Black Messiah, Stanfield is closer to the secret than ever before.

Shaka King’s film, which chronicles the final days of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) through the sullen eyes of FBI informant William O’Neal (Stanfield), finds the actor in his darkest, most nuanced rendition of the Black saboteur to date. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” the 29-year-old said over a Zoom call last week, “I just really wanted to make sure I was getting it right. But then also not getting it too right, if that makes sense.”

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Tirhakah Love
LEVEL
Writer for

African from Texas• Staff Writer at LEVEL • Black politics, Celebrity interviews, TV & Film Criticism • Previously: MTV News, San Francisco Chronicle