Bond forged over two decades comes through in Blindspotting

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 says. “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 is fuelled by a nearly two-decade friendship and a creative synergy 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 spoken-word 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 cross-medium — 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 Lopez Estrada, is a buddy film — both comic and tragic — it’s also 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.

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.

The pair wondered how their idea would fly.

“It’s a hard sell, a race-politics comedy-drama that’s in verse,” Casal says. “But it’s the movie we wanted to make.”

The project came close to being made a few times, then didn’t, for various reasons. Meanwhile, their lives changed.

Casal recalls nights in L.A. sleeping “in one of our crappy cars. Trying to pretend we weren’t so poor that we had to sleep in our cars.”

It seemed like the movie was about to happen when Hamilton came up for Diggs. They figured it would be a quick project for a few months. It turned out to be, well, Hamilton.

Diggs won a 2016 Tony Award, and left the show the next month. A slew of opportunities awaited. In 2017, Casal was home watching Moonlight win the Oscar. He was so happy, “I drunk-texted one of our producers and said, ‘I wish we had made OUR Moonlight.’ And then they said, ‘What if we made it right now?’ And I was like, I don’t know, Diggs is really famous, and really busy.”

But it turned out Diggs, who was involved in at least four projects, would have exactly 22 days free that June.

“To me it sounded like an insane undertaking,” Diggs says. But he was in.

The film screened on opening day at Sundance. What was most gratifying, both men say, is how eager people were to discuss it — and argue.

“The best works of art are ones you come away from and want to talk about,” Diggs says. “We’d have been disappointed if everybody walked away with exactly the same feeling.”