When I call up Miles Caton, it’s less than two weeks before the Oscars. Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s Southern gothic-horror epic the 21-year-old stars in, has been nominated for a record-shattering 16 awards. Michael B. Jordan’s twin brothers Smoke and Stack drive the exhilarating story, but it’s Caton’s Sammie Moore, a quiet yet angsty preacher’s son with a preternatural gift for the blues, who embodies the sound and spirit of the movie.
“It’s been such an incredible journey, and it’s a bittersweet feeling that it’s coming to an end,” Caton says. “It just felt like a movie this whole time, like a dream.”
One of the film’s Oscar nominations is for Best Original Song for “I Lied To You,” performed by Caton and written by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson. In the defining scene of Sinners, Sammie belts the tune at a juke joint as a brief history of Black music unfurls around him. Composed of five different shots—it was called “The Surreal Montage” during filming—the execution is impressive: The camera traverses the space, as Sammie’s voice attracts the ghosts of B-boys, DJs, tribal dancers, guitarists, and ultimately, the evil spirits lurking on the fringes.
I think it’s become a polarizing scene because of how abruptly it interrupts the cool and effortless slow burn of the first half of the film, where Smoke and Stack ride around rural Mississippi persuading a motley crew using pathos, solidarity, and booze to help launch their juke joint. Then Ryan Coogler says fuck it and throws everything at the wall with a sequence that’s dazzlingly complex, colorful, overwrought, restless, and even a little hackneyed—which is to say, it’s quintessential Coogler.
Caton’s excited about the Oscars, but with his Sinners’ chapter closing, he seems even more thrilled to finally get into his recording career, which he put on pause for a couple years after Coogler recruited him for his debut acting role. “That’s where my heart is at,” he says, “Acting is a real thing that I can pursue, but I’ve been working on music for so long and I feel like right after this award season, it’s going to be the perfect time to really drop and show my artistry.”
It’s near-impossible to separate the contours of Caton’s life from show biz. Growing up in a churchgoing household in Brooklyn, he soaked up gospel and R&B from his family, namely his grandfather, who was a pastor, and his mother, the gospel singer Timiney Figueroa. During high school, Caton was recruited to be a backup singer for H.E.R. on tour. A casting agent for a top secret project spotted him at a show, he got the Sinners role, and the rest is history.
With his debut EP due out this summer, Caton revealed the records he loves and the memories he associates with them. He also took me behind the curtains of That Scene.
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