Keith Stanfield
| Keith Stanfield | |
|---|---|
| Born |
LaKeith Lee Stanfield August 12, 1991 San Bernardino, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor, poet, rap artist |
| Years active | 2008–present |
LaKeith Lee "Keith" Stanfield (born August 12, 1991) is an American actor and rapper. He made his feature film debut in Short Term 12 (2013), for which he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. In 2014, he appeared in the horror film The Purge: Anarchy and in the Martin Luther King biopic Selma as civil right activist Jimmie Lee Jackson. In 2015, Stanfield appeared in the film Dope and the biopic about the hip-hop group N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton, where he portrayed Snoop Dogg. In 2016, he appeared in the Oliver Stone biopic Snowden and began starring on the Donald Glover TV series, Atlanta. In 2017, he appeared in Get Out.
Stanfield was born in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in Riverside and Victorville, California. He has said that he "grew up very poor in a fractured family that was dysfunctional on both sides". He decided to become an actor when he was 14 years old, when he joined his high school's drama club. He attended the John Casablancas Modeling and Career Center in Los Angeles, where he was signed by an agency manager and began to audition for commercials.
Stanfield's first role was in the short film Short Term 12 (2009), which was filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton's thesis project at San Diego State University, and won the Jury Award for U.S. Short Filmmaking at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. A year later, he appeared in the short film Gimme Grace (2010), before he gave up acting for several years. He went on to work a number of different jobs—roof work, gardening, at AT&T, and at a legal marijuana factory—before he was contacted by Cretton to reappear in a feature-length adaptation of Short Term 12, his first feature film. For the duration of the film's production, Stanfield practiced method acting, distancing himself from the other cast members like his character, Marcus. He was the only actor to appear in both the short and feature films.
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