As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.

The Character: Darius, Atlanta

As Darius, an eccentric member of Earn’s (Donald Glover’s) close circle of friends, Lakeith Stanfield is at once bizarre and magnetic. There’s an immediately arresting quality to the character, whether he’s defending naming his gun “Daddy” or solemnly intoning, “As humans, we’re always close to destruction. Life itself is but a series of close calls. I mean, how would you know you were alive unless you knew you could die?”

Unlike his friends, Darius seems immune to the daily stresses of life, insisting that “everything’s made up” anyway. He’s the perfect anchor of serenity tethering this surreal series to the ground—albeit not necessarily the same ground most of us tread upon. As Atlanta writer Stefani Robinson puts it, “I think facts are different for him—like gravity or how physics work. I think that those things are as true or as untrue as he wants them to be. I think he sees the world in a completely different way.” That worldview is what makes Darius so fascinating—and Stanfield makes the most of every second he’s on screen.

Courtesy of FX.

How He Came to Life

“My interpretation of him was, this guy is very similar to me,” Stanfield says. “And very similar to a lot of people that I know, who you wouldn’t expect to have these crazy philosophical thoughts—because in their everyday lives they carry themselves as if they aren’t concerned with that kind of stuff . . . What I set out to do was just make him like a person that I know. So many people gravitate toward the character because he’s like their friend—he’s like their homie they know.”

The main goal, Stanfield adds, was just to be authentic—which might be why Darius comes across as so immediately believable and relatable.

Stanfield believes that Darius is “not crazy—but that he could be viewed as crazy.” Darius frequently asks impertinent questions and drops stereotypical stoner lines like this pearl of wisdom: “If we spent the time we spend thinking about not spending money and spent that time on spending money, then it’d be time well-spent.”