Lakeith Stanfield: “I’m Oftentimes Constipated”

Lakeith Stanfield is an emerging talent in the acting world, a performer with a wide variety of roles who somehow manages to be good in all of them. He starred opposite Nnamdi Asomugha in Crown Heights, which released just a week ago, and he plays L in Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the Death Note manga, which released just today.

But forget about all that, it’s not as important as what we’re about to tell you. In a new interview with GQ, the interviewer mostly just tries to have a normal conversation, asking basic questions about Stanfield’s roles in these films. But Stanfield is clearly more interested in talking about justice, the religion he created, and his bowel movements. He also does a somersault at one point.

Here are just some of the quotes from the interview:

“I’m oftentimes constipated.”

”’My religion, it’s self-created. I call it the Tru Religion. I have a tattoo right here.’
[shows tattoo: block letters spell TRU RELIGION]”

”[rubs chair] Oh, this is a great fabric…”

“I ask Carl Sagan … ‘How… do you truth what win?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’”

”[unintelligible hooting]”

“I think more people should eat candy.”

“I want to get into ballet. And some sort of interpretive dance. That’s my next venture.”

Stanfield was much more coherent at the end, when the interviewer asked him what it was like playing his character in Crown Heights, which is about a man wrongly convicted of murder:

Sociologically speaking we’ve been trained to think that there are heroes and villains. And going back to Death Note, that that line is oftentimes blurred. The guys that we think are the heroes, sometimes carry out vicious crimes. And the guys that we think are villains oftentimes only want to survive in a place that is difficult to survive in. So this film to me sort of aptly represents that dichotomy. And through the story of a real man who spent 21 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit—he was the victim and the subject of a corrupt system that seeks chiefly only to acquire names and numbers. And not carry out any real sense of justice. It’s hypocritical. It’s fucked up. It needs to be talked about.

You know, we weren’t looking forward to the new Death Note movie all that much, but now it’s at the top of our list.