How Jamie Lee Curtis helped LaKeith Stanfield through rehab
LaKeith Stanfield and Jamie Lee Curtis, one of his co-stars in Knives Out, bonded immediately in 2018 while making the star-studded 2019 film.
He was taking a break to smoke when Curtis explained why he should put out his cigarette.
"I probably said something to the effect of 'You're a gorgeous, talented, smart, young father with huge opportunities ahead of you: Don't f*** it up by dying of cancer that you can prevent,'" Curtis tells GQ in a new profile on the Get Out and Atlanta actor that describes their relationship.
After that first confrontation, during which they both cried, Stanfield gave up his nicotine habit.
They were then close enough that, after a friend of the two told her that Stanfield was considering sobriety, Curtis contacted Stanfield to express her support. They stayed in touch, via phone calls and texts, as he continued acting and eventually went to rehab.
"She asked me, 'How old are you?'" he remembered of one such conversation. "I was like, 'Uh, about to be 30.' And she said, 'No, how old are you from when you became sober?'" He gave a much different answer: "'Oh, I'm about seven months.' And she goes, 'You’re seven months old. I am 23 years old.'"
Curtis has long been outspoken about her own struggles with addiction to alcohol and pain pills.
"My experience is that when you feel you are alone, that's a very scary feeling," she told the magazine. "So what I was trying to say to him was, 'You are not alone. And if I can be a source of comfort or understanding, then I hope you will allow me to do that.'"
Stanfield had realized that he had a problem in 2020, during the making of the movie The Harder They Fall. One sign was when he reacted in a way that he hadn't before to getting a massage.
"All of a sudden, I got so anxious during it that I just got up, canceled the massage, and told [the masseuse] to leave. And she was probably like, 'What the hell is going on?'" Stanfield said. "And I didn't really know what was happening either. I just thought, I'm anxious, let me just drink some wine. As soon as I drink the wine, the anxiety goes away."
While he thought at the time that the incident was related to the pandemic and making a movie while living through it, he eventually came to see that it was withdrawal from alcohol.
"I had become completely dependent upon it," Stanfield said. "To the point where I wasn't able to move or function a whole day without having it."
He said that he felt compelled to share what he had gone through.
"This is something I never really had talked about before, but I think it's something that I need to talk about because I want people to understand that it's something that you can get through, that it's something that you can get past," he said. "And I want people to feel empowered by the fact that the person they're looking at on that screen has gone through addiction and survived it."
