The actor and musician's first film role was the musical prodigy in the surprise hit horror Sinners. Now he's up for a Bafta and about to perform live at the Oscars - and it's all still sinking in.
It's lunchtime in New York City, and Miles Caton is still in bed. That morning, the 20-year-old star of Sinners set his alarm for 8.30am so he could watch the Oscar nominations live. "As soon as I woke up, I went straight to YouTube," he says, where he learned Sinners had been nominated for 16 Academy Awards, more than any other film in Oscars history. Unsurprisingly, his phone has been blowing up: he's been so busy responding to messages, he's yet to get out of bed.
A southern gothic horror musical set in the 1930s, about the bloodsucking of Black culture, Sinners was the unexpected box office smash of 2025, earning $368m in ticket sales globally. The film co-stars Michael B Jordan and comes from the imagination of Ryan Coogler, the writer-director behind Marvel's Black Panther franchise and the Rocky reboot, Creed. "I watched Black Panther for the first time when I was 12 years old," says Caton, who remembers going to the cinema to see the director's Afrofuturist superhero movie with his whole family. "It was 'Wakanda Forever!' We was putting our fist up!" he says, motioning a Black power fist at the screen. "To me, a Ryan Coogler film was culture," he says.
Dressed in a black hoodie pulled up over a silk skull cap, Caton is calling from his family home in New York (his mum, he says, is downstairs). Since his breakout role in Sinners as Sammie, a preternaturally talented blues singer pulled further and further from the church, Caton has been moving in new, increasingly glamorous circles. Last summer, he sat front-row at Paris fashion week alongside Spike Lee, Idris Elba and Beyoncé. He spent the autumn working the awards circuit, and in the UK has been nominated for the Bafta Rising Star award, whose previous recipients include Kristen Stewart, Daniel Kaluuya and Industry's David Jonsson. A few weeks after our conversation, he attended the Grammys where he wore a very fly Louis Vuitton jacket as Sinners won best score soundtrack.
In 2025, the Oscars scrapped live performances of the best song nominees but when I speak to Caton there are already rumours that they might bring them back this year. "I'm definitely hoping to perform - I think that would be legendary," Caton says, flashing a schoolboy grin. The rumours have since been confirmed, with Caton set to perform I Lied to You, a smouldering blues number written by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson, at the ceremony. The song is a goosebump-inducing showcase for the singer's rich, rumbling baritone; when Caton sings it in the film, his voice is so transcendent it ruptures time. In that scene, Sammie's performance summons the spirits of Black music from the past and the future. One fluid tracking shot captures the exuberant meeting of hip-hop breakdancers, west African drummers and a Jimi Hendrix-style electric guitarist on the dancefloor at a Black-owned juke joint. Caton remembers Coogler explaining the scene as the most important part of the film. "It's showing the transition of music, the evolution of music, the origin of music," he says.
While Sinners is Caton's first ever film role, it's not as though he is a stranger to the spotlight. A particularly angelic video of an 11-year-old Caton crooning Nina Simone's Feelin' Good in the back of a car went viral and ended up as the opening for 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) back in 2022. Wilson was the opening act for Coldplay's European tour, and Caton had been on the road with her. He was still in high school. "It wasn't typical," he admits. "While everybody was still in school, I was seeing a different life." He says he looks back on pictures of himself from that time and is struck by how young he looked.
He describes that period as wearing "a student cap". He shadowed Wilson, gaining inside knowledge of "what it's like to be an artist: the travelling, the interviews, getting sick and still having to show up for shows". Caton says that seeing the sweat and effort that Wilson put into her career was "a big eye-opener, but it made me want it even more". Caton was just getting used to being back home in New York again when Wilson rang him to tell him that someone in the audience at one of her shows wanted him to audition for a "top secret" film role.
"There was no information at all, at first," he says. He sent in a poorly lit self-filmed tape, then returned to the recording studio, where he was spending every free moment working on his own music. "I really didn't know how much I would be in the film, or how time-consuming it was going to be," he says. "It was kind of a good thing, because I feel it might have scared me."
The middle child of two parents who worked in music, Caton says he has "literally been working towards [performing] since I was three years old", adding, "there's never been anything else I've ever had the idea to do". Caton's father was a music producer and his mother "has always been a professional singer" (although, he says, she had a brief stint working in real estate). Caton's mum and aunt are accomplished gospel singers who worked as backing vocalists for Faith Evans and Alicia Keys respectively. When he was growing up, he saw the pair of them as "superheroes".
When Caton was 10 or 11, his uncle taught him to use GarageBand, he says, so he could learn how to make his own music. Mostly, he was just messing around "doing nonsense", but his mum took his ambition seriously. He attended a normal high school but when he reached adolescence she encouraged him to audition for the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts,a music school in Queens. "I got in.Pretty easily,actually,"he says,a knowing smile spreading across his face.He studied there for a year;though the pandemic cut his experience short.
Around this time,Caton's distinctively deep and velvety voice announced itself.At Frank Sinatra,says he was able to work with a vocal teacher as his voice was changing."I just woke up one day and I sounded like this,"he says."It was pretty drastic."Caton had to relearn to sing,finding power in a different place in his range.
In Sinners,Sammie is a preacher’s son who is seduced by a pulsating juke joint,alive with blues,dancing and girls.There is a tension between the environment he has come from and the path beckoned by music.“I definitely drew from my own personal experiences of growing up in a religious family,a Christian household,and growing up in gospel music,”he says.Caton says he related to Sammie’s struggle to navigate“staying true to your morals and what you grew up on”.The film sees him take part in a raunchy love scene that unfolds in one of the juke joint’s back rooms.When asked how his family took it,he roars with unguarded laughter.Yes,”he says,”I warned them in advance.”“Everybody was just kinda like: ‘OK … this is a little edgy,’”he says.Ultimately,they trusted Coogler.“I think the movie is meant to be relatable,and to show real-life scenarios,”Caton adds with an awkward laugh.
"HECK YEA I crashed out" wrote his aunt in a teasing 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 right in our faces." At the end of the month, his family will continue to cheer him, this time from inside Hollywood's Dolby theatre. Caton says he is an awards show watcher and so he hasn't quite wrapped his head round the fact that this year he'll be watching from a different seat. "I watch the Grammys, I watch the Oscars, I watch the Golden Globes," he says. "So to be on the flipside of it just feels like a strange dream."