Friendship fuels the chemistry of film
NEW YORK Daveed Diggs was busy. Too busy. The actor was doing eight shows a week as Jefferson/ Lafayette in the Broadway sensation Hamilton, and wasn’t answering his emails.
So there was only one thing his writing partner and creative soulmate, Rafael Casal, could do: Move across the country, and set up camp in Diggs’ dressing room.
“Every night, he’d just be there at intermission,” Diggs laughs now. “He had to move to New York for us to maintain a level of creative output.”
With the opening this week of Blindspotting, their Oakland, California-based, rap-infused feature film debut, the duo is earning buzz for the onscreen chemistry that gives the film its energy. That chemistry, in turn, is fuelled by a nearly two-decade friendship and a creative synergy that both men call remarkable.
“As long as I’ve known him, I’ve never had an idea that I didn’t run by him, and that includes character choices in Hamilton,” Diggs, 36, said recently over tea in New York. “I don’t have a ton of things that don’t involve him, and even if they don’t in name, realistically they still involve him.”
To Casal, 32, a spokenword artist, what’s most rare is how versatile the partnership is. “You pick your partners in the trenches because they make you better,” he says. “What’s unique about our dynamic is that it’s crossmedium — film, music, theatre, television. That’s not even a once-in-a-lifetime thing, because many people go through life and it never happens.”
Though Blindspotting, directed by Carlos López Estrada, is a buddy film — both comic and tragic — it’s also very much about a place: Oakland, a town both men hold dear. It’s there, in the Bay Area, that they first met, at Berkeley High School. They didn’t become friends right away, because Casal was a freshman and Diggs a senior. “That might as well be a 50-year gap,” Casal quips.
Diggs went off to Brown University, where he ran track and studied theatre. By the time he came back, Casal, who’d made a name for himself on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, had opened a recording studio and needed artists.
“Somebody played me his music. I loved it. He came by, and we just hit it off,” Casal says. “From then on, all I remember is him being around.”
It was nearly a decade ago that they began work on Blindspotting, the story of Collin (Diggs), who has three days left on probation for a violent incident, and Miles (Casal), his mercurial, unpredictable best friend.
Collin witnesses a police shooting of an unarmed black man; the two must navigate the next few days together, each in his own way, in an Oakland that is rapidly changing.
The film explores themes of race, economics, gentrification — and friendship.