Checking in with RADIO.COM and V-103’s The Morning Culture, actor Lakeith Stanfield called in to catch up with Big Tigger, Tylerchronicles, and Christina “Ms. Basketball” Granville and discuss his role as William O’Neal in the soon to be released Shaka King film, Judas and the Black Messiah.
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Sharing his hopes for the movies reception, Stanfield also dives into the difficulty of taking on such a role and what he believes to be the most important lesson to be learned. It’s all about the path you choose.
More than his hopes for how people receive the film, he hopes they set out to watch it with an open heart and open mind. “A lot of people seem to not know about Chairman Fred Hampton,” Stanfield said. “I hope they can educate themselves and get a little information from this film and go and do their research about who this young man was and what he did for people of all kinds of different backgrounds.”
Furthermore he hopes “people take from it that you got a choice, you know, and you can either end up being more Chairman Fred Hapmton-esque or William O’Neal-esque. Which side do you want to be on?”
For those who don’t know the story, the short synopsis of the film according to IMDb explains it as “the story of Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, and his fateful betrayal by FBI informant William O’Neal."
At first Lakeith looked at the prospect of playing William O’Neal as a role he wasn’t sure he wanted to take on. However after sitting with him for a while he came to realization that “it was a unique approach to a story like this and could present a unique challenge… and it did, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.”
A role like this, going deep into an emotional place and takes its toll on an actor, for Stanfield there are both negative and positive aspects to taking that challenge on. As he explained, “there are two sides to that, on one hand I don’t like talking about the negative aspects of, and the things that have happened in the past that relates to Black people, I just get exhausted with it.” Knowing that there are so many stories to tell, Lakeith feels it exhausting to have to “go through the tragedy time and time again”
On the other hand Lakeith recalled, “being zapped back into the 60s,” immersed and able to experience historic moments like Hampton’s “I’m a Revolutionary” speech, while looking out in the crowd, “seeing all these afros and all these beautiful Black people, all in a court… aimed towards one central thing, it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen in my life.”
“Being able to be in that place and space, and know that this is who we are, and this is our potential, and this is what we do if we unlock ourselves, which you know comes from the inside out. That was a beautiful reassurance.”
While the film tells a serious story it also has a multitude of levels to it, some fun moments and some emotional moments, and those who watch it can walk away with knowledge beyond just looking through pictures in a book or hearing second hand stories from family members.
When asked what he viewed as the most important lesson that can be learned from it all, Lakeith once again urged the importance of choice. “If ya’ll don’t choose, you become the apparatus that creates the same kind of problem. It’s important for us to be aware of these kinds of stories, so we don’t repeat the same thing.”
“There’s two very important groups of people that I want to see this movie and that’s youth in Chicago, and white people," hopes Lakeith. You have to educate yourselves on what your government and what your people are doing and how they use misinformation to discredit groups… You all gotta do your research and you’ve gotta educate yourself, so hopefully this provides an opportunity for people to do that.”
Additionally Lakeith hopes “people are entertained and moved by the tenacity and ferocity” actor Daniel Kaluuya brings to the character or Fred Hampton. And that they are also “able to identify with the overall tragedy of all this. How even if you try to choose the route that you thought was the best route because it was saving your own a** at the end of the day, you do a lot of harm to yourself by trying to put yourself first.”
In what we can only describe as a mic drop closing remark, Lakeith posed the following thought and question. “Chairman Fred Hampton died. You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill a revolution. His spirit and thought lives on, while O’Neal is casted into the darkness of history forever. And that’s because of the different routes they chose to choose. So I challenge people to ask, which route do you want to choose?”
For all that and more, check out the full interview with Lakeith Stanfield above. Judas and the Black Messiah releases this Friday February 12th in theaters and on HBO Max.
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