The breakout star of ‘Sinners’ started his journey with a blues playlist from Ryan Coogler

(CNN) — Miles Caton was prepping for his first-ever movie role when the film’s director Ryan Coogler sent him a playlist of essential blues music.

“It had the greats on there — Charley Patton, Buddy Guy, B.B. King — so I just started to listen to that for the first couple weeks,” Caton told CNN.

Soon, Caton was on the journey to becoming Sammie Moore, also known as Preacher Boy, a central character in best picture nominee “Sinners.”

Caton was 18 when he first started having conversations about being in the movie, in which he plays a preacher’s son who resists the pull of his father in favor of a life devoted to the blues (and his cousins, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan). The Brooklyn native is 21 now, with a piercingly deep voice, an easy smile and a determined ambition to build on his role in the most-nominated film in Oscars history.

“I never could have anticipated the reaction and the response that the film would have,” Caton told CNN.

In addition to its 16 Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best original score, the movie has won two Golden Globes, three BAFTAs (not without controversy), 13 NAACP Image Awards and two Actor Awards.

The film is produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, which is owned by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.

Music is at the center of “Sinners,” which is set in a fictional version of the real Clarksdale, Mississippi, a part of the United States considered the birthplace of blues.

From the inspiration of the playlist Coogler sent to the work of making the movie a reality, Caton dove right in.

“I started learning how to play guitar, resonator guitar, which is specific to the film and Mississippi,” Caton said. The score for the movie is produced by Ludwig Göransson, a multi-Grammy and Oscar winning musician who has collaborated with Coogler often.

“When I connected with Ludwig, he taught me ‘I Lied To You’ on the guitar actually, so we didn’t have any lyrics,” or any type of track at that point, Caton explained.

“I Lied To You” became the centerpiece song of the film, serving as the anchor for one of the movie’s most iconic scenes — a dream-like sequence where Caton’s character demonstrates “the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future,” as the movie’s narration lays out at the beginning.

Caton recalled Göransson bringing him to the studio a week or two before the scene was shot. “He played me the song and I was just like, this is gas,” Caton said with a smile. “It embodied everything Sammie was trying to say in the film.”

But even he couldn’t imagine how it would look in the end, even after seeing an animated video that plotted it out, typically described as a “previsualization.”

“The way it was written out,” Caton said, he thought the scene would be “maybe like ghosts flying around or something like that.”

“Just seeing that come to life off the page, it was mind blowing, bro,” he said.

Another emotional musical moment comes in a mid-credits scene for the movie.

The song that plays was written and voiced by both Caton and Alice Smith, a Grammy- nominated recording artist who has put out multiple albums and whose music has been featured in films like “The Harder They Fall” and HBO’s “Lovecraft Country.”

Smith told CNN it took her and Caton “a couple of hours” to write ‘Last Time (I Seen the Sun),’ after she was shown a few scenes from the film to get a feel for it.

When she finally saw the film, “I thought it was amazing how perfectly it was where it was,” Smith said, especially in contrast to the horror-thriller induced scenes that precede it, the song “brings you all the way back down.”

The lasting image is of the “Smokestack Twins,” both played by Michael B. Jordan, staring across a long field at a low sun on the horizon.

“It literally looks like my childhood,” Smith said. “A specific morning view at my grandmother’s place out off the back porch across the fields.”

One music producer for the movie told CNN Coogler played Smith’s rendition of Nina Simone’s “I Put A Spell On You” to help build the atmosphere during filming certain scenes.

“Especially the love making scenes,” Smith whispered with a laugh to CNN. “What they used of mine was something that was particularly emotional and emotive,” she said.

Locking In

Striking gold on his first major film, on top of a thriving musical career buoyed by his booming voice (including a new original song called “Somethin”), Caton has options ahead of him.

At the Oscars this weekend, he’s due to be the center of a special performance of “I Lied To You” alongside songwriter Raphael Saadiq and other “Sinners” music collaborators.

But he’s also been performing on a big stage for years, going viral as a kid for singing a rendition of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good,” then appearing multiple times on NBC’s Little Big Shots alongside Steve Harvey back in 2018, and touring nationally alongside H.E.R.

He recently won the NAACP award for outstanding breakthrough performance for “Sinners,” the Critics’ Choice Award for best young performer, and was named to the TIME 100’s most influential rising stars.

Caton said the process of filming “Sinners” helped him grow, especially in terms of “pushing through” uncertainty and doubt.

“I definitely felt the pressure but like, I always just kept telling myself to just like lock in,” he said. “You’re placed here for a reason to do what you were called to do,” he remembered reminding himself.

He also knew the movie was going to be special, but not quite like this.

“I think I’m shocked because I’m a part of it, but when I look outside of me being in the film and just seeing the film, it’s like, it makes sense. It’s a good movie,” Caton said with a laugh.

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