LaKeith Stanfield on getting inside his troubled Judas And The Black Messiah character

In some ways, LaKeith Stanfield’s Bill O’Neal is responsible for the sad ending of Judas And The Black Messiah. Facing five years in jail for impersonating a federal officer and attempting to steal a car, O’Neal opts to instead infiltrate the Black Panthers. He thinks he’ll just feed a little information back to the feds before going on his merry thieving way. That’s not how it works out, though, and the feds in the film end up lording that jail time and, ultimately, the threat of outing him to the Panthers over O’Neal’s head, leading to him ultimately having a hand in the death of Panthers leader Fred Hampton.