Sinners star Miles Caton: ‘I didn’t know how long I’d be in the movie… it probably scared me’ | Sinners

IIt’s lunchtime in New York City and Miles Caton is still in bed. That morning, the 20-year-old Sinners star set his alarm for 8:30 a.m. so he could watch the Oscar nominations live. “As soon as I woke up, I went straight to YouTube,” he says, where he learned that Sinners had been nominated for 16 Academy Awards, more than any other film in Academy Awards history. Unsurprisingly, his phone had gone off: he’d been too busy answering messages, and hadn’t gotten out of bed yet.

Sinners, a Southern gothic horror musical set in the 1930s about vampires in black culture, was an unexpected box office success in 2025, earning $368 million in ticket sales globally. The film co-stars Michael B. Jordan and is inspired by the imagination of Ryan Coogler, the writer-director behind Marvel’s Black Panther series and the Rocky, Creed reboot. “I saw Black Panther for the first time when I was 12,” says Caton, who remembers going to the movies to see the Afrofuturist director’s superhero film with his whole family. “It was ‘Wakanda Forever!’ We were raising our fists!” He says as he points a black power fist at the screen. “For me, it’s a Ryan Coogler movie He was Culture,” he says.

Wearing a black jacket with a silk hood, Catton is calling from his family home in New York (his mother, he says, is downstairs). Since his breakout role in Sinners as Sammie, a preternaturally gifted blues singer who has withdrawn further and further from the church, Caton has been moving in increasingly glamorous new circles. Last summer, he sat front row at Paris Fashion Week alongside Spike Lee, Idris Elba and Beyoncé. He spent the fall working the awards circuit, and in the UK he was nominated for a BAFTA Rising Star Award, whose previous winners include Kristen Stewart, Daniel Kaluuya and the industry’s David Johnson. A few weeks after our conversation, he attended the Grammy Awards, where he wore a heavy-duty Louis Vuitton flight jacket where Sinners won Best Original Score.

In 2025, the Oscars canceled live performances of best-song nominees, but when I spoke to Caton, there were already rumors they might bring them back this year. “I certainly hope to do that performance – I think it will be legendary,” Caton says, flashing a schoolboy smile. Rumors have since been confirmed, with Caton set to perform “I Lied to You,” the blazing blues song written by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson, at the concert. The song is a goosebump-inducing showcase of the singer’s rich baritone. When Catton sings it in the film, his voice is so transcendent that it tears apart time. In this scene, Sammy’s performance summons the spirits of black music from the past and future. One fluid tracking shot captures a spirited meeting between hip-hop dancers, West African drummers and a Jimi Hendrix-style electric guitarist on the dance floor of a black-owned juke club. Catton recalls Coogler explaining the scene as the most important part of the film. “It shows the transformation of music, the evolution of music, the origin of music,” he says.

While Sinners is Caton’s first ever film role, he’s no stranger to the spotlight. A particularly angelic video of an 11-year-old Katon singing Nina Simone’s “Feelin’ Good” in the back of a car went viral, and ended up as the opening of Jay-Z’s 2017 music video 4:44. He was invited to audition for Sinners after a casting agent spotted him singing backing vocals for R&B singer HER (whose real name is Gabriella Wilson) in 2022. Wilson was the opening act for Coldplay’s European tour, and Caton was on the road with her. He was still in high school. “It wasn’t typical,” he admits. “While everyone was still in school, I was seeing a different life.” He says he looks at the photos he took of himself at that time and is amazed at how young he looked.

He describes that period as wearing a “student hat.” He tracked Wilson down, gaining inside knowledge “of what it means to be an artist: the travel, the interviews, the illness, and still having to show up for shows.” Caton says seeing the effort and sweat Wilson put into her career was “a huge surprise, but it made me want it even more.” Catton was back home in New York again when Wilson called him to tell him that an audience member at one of her shows wanted him to audition for a “top secret” movie role.

“There was no information at all at first,” he says. He sent out a poorly lit self-shot tape, then returned to the recording studio, where he spent every free moment working on his own music. “I didn’t really know how much time I was going to be in the movie, or how long it would take,” he says. “It was kind of a good thing, because I feel like it probably scared me.”

The middle child of parents in the music business, Caton says he “literally had it working for him.” [performing] “Since I was three years old,” he said, adding, “There was nothing else I had ever thought of doing.” Catton’s father was a music producer and his mother was “always a professional singer” (although, he says, she had a brief stint working in real estate). Caton’s mother and aunt are accomplished gospel singers who have worked as backing singers for Faith Evans and Alicia Keys, respectively. When he was growing up, he saw them as a “superhero” couple.

When Caton was 10 or 11, his uncle taught him how to use GarageBand, he says, so he could learn how to make his own music. Mostly, he was just fooling around “doing nonsense”, but his mother took his ambition seriously. He attended a regular high school but when he reached his teens she encouraged him to audition for the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a music school in Queens. “I got in. Quite easily, actually,” he said, a wide smile spreading across his face. He studied there for a year, although the pandemic cut short his experience.

It was around this time that Caton’s deep, velvety voice announced itself. In Frank Sinatra, he says he was able to work with a voice teacher as his voice was changing. “I just woke up one day and it looked like this,” he says. “It was very radical.” Catton had to learn to sing again, finding strength in a different place in his repertoire.

In Sinners, Sammie is a preacher’s son who is seduced by a throbbing music joint, a life of blues, dancing, and girls. There is a tension between the environment he comes from and the path the music charts. “I definitely drew from my personal experience growing up in a religious family, a Christian family, and growing up in gospel music,” he says. Caton says it relates to Sammy’s struggle to navigate “to stay true to your morals and what you grew up with.” The film sees him participating in a saucy love scene unfolding in one of the back rooms of the Jock Joint. When asked how his family took it, he laughed uncontrollably. Yes, he says, he warned them in advance. “Everyone was like, ‘Well… that’s a bit edgy,'” he says. In the end, they trusted Coogler. “I think the goal of the film is to be relatable and to show real-life scenarios,” Catton adds with an awkward laugh.

“I’m devastated,” his aunt wrote in a ridiculous but supportive Instagram post acknowledging the scene. “Not just for me, but for all the #AuntieMoms in the world who have to watch their nieces and nephews become adults in our faces.” At the end of the month, his family will continue to cheer him on, this time from inside the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. Caton says he’s an awards show watcher so he hasn’t quite gotten over the fact that he’ll be watching this year from a different seat. “I watch the Grammy Awards, I watch the Oscars, I watch the Golden Globes,” he says. “So being on the other side of it feels like a weird dream.”

The BAFTA ceremony is here February 227pm, BBC One and iPlayer; Sinners is available on streaming platforms now.