Just Kids

In 2013, a bunch of unknowns made a tiny movie called Short Term 12. Ten years later, a shocking number have become stars, Oscar winners, superheroes, or all of the above. BRIE LARSON, RAMI MALEK, LAKEITH STANFIELD, STEPHANIE BEATRIZ, KAITLYN DEVER, and writer-director DESTIN DANIEL CRETTON dish about the undersung drama that launched their careers

- DEVIN GORDON

DESTIN DANIEL CRETTON was just trying to give a struggling young actor a job. How hard could it be?

He and LaKeith Stanfield had worked together three years earlier, on a 22-minute short film Cretton made in 2009, called Short Term 12, which won the Grand Prix award at the Sundance Film Festival. Now Cretton was turning it into a full-length feature. As with his original short, the script was based on his two-year experience post-college working in a juvenile care facility—the story of a shift leader at a group home, her weary young staff, and the scarred kids in their care. Stanfield had made his onscreen debut in the short, playing the critical role of the facility’s senior resident, a quiet, seething young man on the cusp of his 18th birthday, after which he’d need to “cycle out” into the adult world.

Cretton wanted to make Stanfield the lone holdover from the original cast, or at least give him an audition. But the actor wasn’t checking his email and didn’t appear to have a phone number. Cretton was confident he’d turn up, though. He hoped he would turn up. He was starting to worry he might not turn up.

“I think Destin was under the impression—and I think other people too, because I’d read this—that I had quit acting,” Stanfield says now over the phone. “But it wasn’t that I had quit, I just wasn’t booking anything. For a long time, I was just failing.”