sinners, undeniably one of the year’s best movies, begins with some lore-building. It tells of an ability to create music so powerful that it can bridge the cavernous gaps between space and time, past and future. That seems like a big ask: who could possibly have a voice capable of communing with the spirit realm? But then you hear Miles Caton’s Sammie – who possesses a set of pipes that pluck at your nerve endings like guitar strings – and it all makes perfect sense.
You know the scene. The awe-inspiring centrepiece of Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller/horror/musical. The juke joint run by twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) has opened its doors. The booze is flowing just as freely as the blues music, and Sammie steps up on stage to perform ‘I Lied To You’, a toe-tapping number about a preacher boy embracing music in defiance of his father. Then an electric guitar rings out, the scratch of a turntable and artists from all continents and pockets of history converge in a centuries-spanning performance of dance, community and cultural harmony.
It’s an astonishing sequence but when the 20-year-old actor first read about it in the script, there wasn’t a song attached to it yet. It wasn’t until he touched down on set in New Orleans that Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson showed him the rough sketches of the track he co-wrote with Raphael Saadiq. “There were still no lyrics, no context to it,” Caton remembers. “It was just the chords.” A month or two into the shoot, he finally heard ‘I Lied to You’ in its breathtaking entirety for the first time. His reaction: “Yeah, this is gonna be good.”
Seven months after Sinners became an instant phenomenon and earned more than $360million worldwide, Caton is still happily riding the wave. Regarding the Halloween litmus test for pop culture icons, the actor spent the evening at a screening of the film surrounded by dozens of Sammies, Smokes and Stacks. We sit down at a central London hotel, where he reclines dressed in glasses, a yellow jumper and grey wash jeans. The side-effects of a neverending promo tour don’t show on his face. “I like to be home, of course – I’m a homebody.” he says. “But I love working towards what I love to do, so it doesn’t feel like work.”
Just a few days earlier, Caton and his Sinners crew received six Grammy nominations. He heard the news while he was here in London: “I took a nap and something just woke me up,” he says. “Of course, I knew that the nominations would be that day but I think I was woken up because something was happening.” He opened his phone and watched the accolades tally up. “I started screaming in my room. It just continues to be a blessing.”
“The first time I performed as a kid, I kew this is what I wanted to do”
Caton says that Coogler’s film found him at the right time. He and his preternatural vocal ability were discovered early when his cover of Nina Simone‘s ‘Feeling Good’ went viral and was sampled in the opening montage video for Jay-Z’s 2017 single ‘4:44’. He was just 12 years old. His formative teenage years were then spent on the road with American R&B singer-songwriter H.E.R. as a backing singer. After the tour ended, he found himself in the liminal space of wondering what was next. “I was working on music and stuff but I was home, just chilling,” he explains. “I got the call one day, and it was to audition for this movie.” Remarkably, Sinners is his acting debut.
Beyond sharing a talent for music, Caton felt connected to Sammie. “We were both the same age, same space, and [we] both had an ambition that we just couldn’t shake,” he says. Caton started singing from around the age of three, and even that early on, his dreams had crystallised fully. “The first time I performed as a kid, I kew this is what I wanted to do.” Getting familiar with the blues took a little learning though. As a child, he had loved performing Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ but Coogler loaded him up with homework in the form of a playlist filled with the likes of Charley Patton and Buddy Guy.
The blues feel right at home in Sinners because it has that transportive quality. “I feel like the raw, authentic storytelling that the blues has…” Caton begins to explain, before searching for the right words. “It’s not something that we so much lost in music but it’s just not something that is always the focus. And back then, that was the main thing. Especially in the early days, all of the chords were pretty much the same but just made a different way. So what made it different was each artist telling their story over those same chords. And that’s what made people resonate with it or dance to it or cry to it.”
“No day is promised. And so you’ve got to live like it’s the last time”
Even with Caton’s natural affinity for music, he had to learn to play blues guitar to Sammie’s virtuosic level. Initially he was so out of his depth, that when he was told he would be playing a resonator guitar – which uses metal cones to amplify the strings instead of a wooden soundboard – he hadn’t even heard of it.
“YouTube is the key to learning anything,” he says of his starting point. “Production actually sent me a guitar, but the first guitar they sent me was a lap steel guitar” – the kind that lies horizontally across your lap – “so I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I might be out the game on this one.’” Once production rectified the error and sent Caton the actual, blissfully upright guitar, he felt like he had a better shot. “If I really lock in and discipline myself and practice, I can get pretty close to where I need to be.”
Beyond the show-stopping ‘I Lied To You’, Coogler also enlisted Caton to write the end credits track ‘Last Time (I Seen The Sun)’ with Göransson and Alice Smith. At their writing session, Göransson laid the contextual foundations for the number by playing the film’s mid-credits scene: an elderly Sammie sees Stack and Mary (played by Hailee Steinfeld) and tells them that before the vampires unleashed hell on the juke joint, he considers that day as the greatest of his life. That bittersweet feeling of unadulterated joy cruelly extinguished informed the writing of the song.
“That’s what stuck to all of us,” Caton explains. “We got to write something around that, something that can sum up the movie, but also just be completely authentic and relatable to everyone around the world. The feeling of just leaving it all out there. No day is promised,” he says, with the sense that it’s a sentiment he’s continued to live by. “And so you’ve got to live like it’s the last time.”