DAVEED DIGGS
...DAVEED DIGGS lives life at hyperspeed, but he’s only just getting started
The man who was Lafayette and Jefferson in Hamilton is not throwing away his shot at the big screen. Yes, we know that was a Lin-manuel Miranda song, but it just fits.
On stage, on screen, on vinyl, Daveed Diggs crackles.
He has a built-in vibrancy — constantly alert, he’s a big-brained energy drink, a wide-eyed one-man army. But it’s the voice that really cuts through. It sounds like metal.
That voice was the making of him. He was a shy, awkward fourth-grader when he first realised what he could do. Every week a teacher had them memorise poems, and finally the ten-yearold Diggs stood up and recited one, projecting, exclaiming. His classmates laughed in all the right places; he loved it. He felt confident, empowered. More significantly, everybody was listening. It changed his life.
“The meter and the cadence and the rhyme-scheme forces your ear to hear things,” he explains now of spoken word, and of that revelatory moment. “And for a kid, when nobody particularly wants to listen to you, if you can make something that is virtuosic… it forces people to listen to you.”
Today, everybody’s listening. In 2016 Diggs was said to be, thanks to a verse in Hamilton’s ‘Guns And Ships’, the fastest rapper on Broadway (more of which later). His virtuosity — specifically some desperate, furious spoken verse — underpinned Blindspotting, the battle-cry film he spent a decade co-writing. More recently, for Ethan Hawke’s pre-civil War TV drama The Good Lord Bird, Hawke handpicked Diggs to play Frederick Douglass, the world’s greatest orator. Who else?
Diggs is using his voice to great effect, choosing — and creating — roles that mean something to him. He’s had a humble journey and he is not, he tells Empire, throwing away his shot.
I’VE HAD A lot of really great teachers, and in a lot of ways they saved my life,” Diggs says. He’s been reflecting on his youth, when he overcame his shyness through poetry, then spoken word, then rap. He grew up in Oakland, California, to a white mother and Black father, “poor but not bored, and not sad”. A handful of mentors recognised his talent, pushing him to improve.
“When you become a teenager, you have to find something,” he explains. “Because you’re constructing an identity for yourself, and the things that you latch onto at that age are things that you do. ‘I play sports, so do these people, so that’s my identity.’ ‘I do drugs, so do these people, so that’s my identity.’ Having teachers who acknowledged me as an artist allowed me to have that identity. And that’s at the point where your surroundings start to matter. The other things to get involved in were not necessarily a ticket to success.”
Diggs became a teacher himself when he was trying to break through, after graduating in theatre arts from Brown University in 2004. He taught poetry and acting to middle-school kids, and created a rap curriculum for them. He had been rapping since he was 12, and in 2010 joined the experimental hip hop group Clipping; he had a lot to discuss, then, when in 2012 he was booked as a substitute teacher for a class and another teacher and rapper, Anthony Veneziale, was erroneously booked for the same kids. And once again Diggs’ life was changed.
Veneziale and Diggs taught the class together that day, hung out afterwards, and within time, Veneziale invited Diggs to join the improvisational rap group he was in, Freestyle Love Supreme. There Diggs met Lin-manuel Miranda, who’d already had a hit musical with In The Heights, was cooking up Hamilton and, dazzled by Diggs’ skills, asked him to join the workshops. Diggs, who was trying to catch a break in New York — sleeping on friends’ couches, napping on subway trains when there were no couches available, delivering fajitas for a catering company at 5am, going to auditions — certainly needed a gig, but thought
Hamilton, using hip hop, as he saw it, to teach history, was a terrible idea. He loved Miranda though, loved witnessing him at work in Freestyle Love Supreme. “He’s brilliant,” Diggs says. “He’s got so much energy and he’s genuinely funny and so charming. He’s just that dude. Watching him in Freestyle is like watching an animal in its natural habitat.” So he agreed to take part in the Hamilton workshops.
It didn’t take him long to realise how good it was. Miranda sent him the song demos, in which he performed all the roles, and Diggs was impressed with the passion and sincerity. “I was wrong about it being a bad idea,” he laughs.
Miranda asked Diggs to play two roles in Hamilton: in
Act 1, French expat Marquis de Lafayette, and then in Act 2, an enormously extravagant Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Miranda had shaped the roles around Diggs, playing to his strengths — certainly his charisma, and definitely his vocal dexterity. “What [director] Tommy Kail and Lin told me later was, ‘We knew something that audiences didn’t: we knew that we had this ringer, that you existed. They didn’t know you existed. So we wanted to write you into that space. It makes everybody look good.’”
Hamilton kicked off in 2015, hitting Broadway later that year. People calling Diggs the fastest rapper on Broadway was, to him, an empty accolade. “I had a hard time accepting the acclaim that came along with my performance. Because the rapping, my special skill — that’s easy, that was lower-level stuff. I’ve done more impressive rapping in my life!” He was afraid the rap community would find it corny; they didn’t.
Diggs won a Tony for his work, and an ensemble Grammy with the cast. But there was another sense of dissatisfaction. At last, at 33, he was successful — incredibly so — but he hadn’t written Hamilton. It wasn’t his. Bubbling up though, was something that was.
BLINDSPOTTING WAS BORN in 2007. Diggs’ friend and frequent collaborator Rafael Casal — they’d been at the same school, and made albums, plays and web series together — had been asked by producer Jess Calder to think about writing a screenplay. She’d seen a video of Casal performing his poem Monster on Youtube, about death and numbness, and asked him if there might be a film in utilising such spoken verse. Three years later she saw Diggs perform too, and said it should involve both of them; the pair went to work on it, writing about their Oakland background, about police brutality, gentrification and friendship.
“We didn’t know anything about making a movie,” Diggs says. “We just started writing. We didn’t know enough of the rules to know we were breaking any rules. We were trying to get Oakland represented on screen in a way that felt honest, and the best way to do that was to have as much rhythm and cadence in the voice as possible, because that’s just how we talk.”
Blindspotting swirls around Collin (Diggs), a young man on probation, desperate to stay out of trouble, not helped by his reckless best friend, Miles (Casal). Collin witnesses police shooting an unarmed Black man, and is then plagued by his own inaction. The film was influenced by real-world events, not least the fact that, for a few years in his early twenties, Diggs, in an old car and a big afro, was pulled over by police almost 40 times.
Blindspotting was personal. 2009, the year he and Casal started writing it, also saw the fatal police shooting of the unarmed Oscar Grant in an Oakland subway station — four blocks from where Diggs lived. He was there for the marches and protests; it seismically influenced the film.
It was finally ready to shoot in 2015, but then Hamilton came along. After that, Diggs was in demand, taking on TV roles in Kenya Barris’ Black-ish, Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down and Tina Fey’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and in the 2017 film Wonder (in which he played a teacher, with a performance inspired by the teachers who encouraged him). In 2017, they finally went for it, with Carlos López Estrada, who had directed some of Diggs and Casal’s online work, behind the camera.
Blindspotting, ten years in the making, felt ever relevant. Diggs and Casal had kept writing it over the years, consistently updating it, right up to the wire. This summer, with the murder of George Floyd and the amplification of Black Lives Matter, it struck a chord all over again. For Diggs, though, the feelings he was exploring in the film had been a constant presence. “Those emotions never left, for me,” he says. “For most Black people in America, that’s not a thing we take a break from. I’m very happy that Blindspotting exists and when George Floyd was murdered, the amount of people pointing to it and saying, ‘Watch this,’ or, ‘I just watched this and it gave me some clarity on the situation’ — I’m very glad for that. But the resurgence of interest in Black Lives Matter has an element of frustration for me. A lot of people were coming to me and saying, ‘You have to say something.’ And I was like, ‘I’ve been saying this same thing for ten years. And spent ten years making a movie about it that exists. My position hasn’t changed.’”
He laughs, frustrated with the stasis. “I feel the same way about this as I have for my whole life! Every time I’ve been pulled over by a police officer for no reason I’ve had the same response. It doesn’t change. So there is an element of frustration, but I try to
moderate it because overall it is positive to continue to be able to shed light on issues that are real for all of us.”
As the title suggests, Blindspotting is about working to understand someone else’s lived experience. To see those blindspots. In 2020, many people began to do that a little more. Diggs is pleased the film is still resonating. “I like to make things,” he says. “They’re not always useful, and I’m not always chasing things that are useful, either. But it is gratifying when people find a piece of art that you made useful. We saw the same thing with ‘Chapter 319’, the Clipping song that we put out as a protest song to be used at the marches that were happening in response to Floyd’s murder.”
The lyrics of ‘Chapter 319’ were straightforward, with lines directly referring to Floyd’s murder and the environment that enabled it. “Donald Trump is a white supremacist, full stop,” rapped Diggs. “If you vote for him again you’re a white supremacist, full stop.” The protestors embraced it, and it raised thousands of dollars for racial justice charities. It was useful.
DIGGS IS TIRED. You wouldn’t know it — during Empire’s conversation he’s utterly engaged, despite it being 6.30am in Vancouver. He’s up early to talk before hitting the set of Snowpiercer, the television adaptation of Bong Joon-ho’s wild sci-fi drama about a train perpetually shooting across a frozen Earth. Diggs, who plays the lead, homicide detective/emerging revolutionary/ formidable ass-kicker Andre Layton, is nearing the end of filming Season 2, having returned after a few months of Covid-inflicted hiatus.
“I feel exhausted most of the time,” he laughs, responding to allegations of boundless energy. He’s constantly working, he says, because when he’s not acting for other people, he can’t stop creating. “As I get older and start thinking about starting a family, I don’t want to always be running like this. But sometimes, the idea is so good! And I really want it to exist!” he laughs.
Bong’s vision carries through to the show in interesting ways, says Diggs. “A lot of Director Bong’s films are personal stories about social structure. About the mechanisms of class and how that affects real people. That is very much in the DNA of our Snowpiercer. It’s about the human cost of class.” And if you’re going to explore class, at some point it’s going to have to involve race too, he says, despite discourse in the US awkwardly separating the two. “The truth of America is that those things are connected. There’s no economy without the slave trade.”
This is something he’s brought up behind the scenes on Snowpiercer: that the show could benefit from looking at racial politics. In the film, the equivalent character was played by Chris Evans. Layton wasn’t written for a Black man, but with Diggs cast, he wants to get into it. “There are different opportunities when the leader of your revolution happens to be Black,” he says. “There’s an opportunity to write into those things more, but also to try and do it responsibly, given how few people of colour are in the writers’ room. Being able to speak to the complicated reality of our world is an opportunity. Diversity in all aspects of production shouldn’t be a burden. It is an opportunity to tell stories better, and more deeply.”
Such opportunities to get involved are growing for Diggs — he only ended up voicing a role in Pixar’s Soul because the studio invited him to be part of their “cultural council” a few years back. “This is their first film with a Black protagonist, so they invited Black artists and community members in to watch early animatics of the show,” he says. “And give notes on how we felt about it. And they really listened.”
Since he was a kid, people have been listening to Diggs. And if Hamilton was his big breakthrough as a performer, since Blindspotting, different doors have opened. “Once you make something, you end up being spoken to a different way,” he says. “It’s, ‘Holy shit, this person made something and other people put money in it.’ The nature of the meetings I was having changed from, ‘We have this thing you might be good for,’ to, ‘What do you want to do?’”
One thing he wanted to do was more Blindspotting — namely, a television show, again written by Diggs and Casal, with the same producers and cast. Shooting now, it focuses on Ashley, Miles’ long-suffering girlfriend from the film, played by Jasmine Cephas Jones (who starred in Hamilton alongside Diggs). “So we’re writing for her now, and not really for us in the same way,” says Diggs. “We’re expanding her world and exploring what she’s going through.”
As with all of the work he creates, he wants it to be challenging. He likes playing complex characters in complex situations, in films and shows that credit their audiences with intelligence. And it all comes from those that did the same for him. “All of my teachers were like, ‘You’re a really smart, talented person — you should exist in that space. Stop pretending that that isn’t true.’ So I don’t want to spoon-feed you something, I want you to have to do the work to really enjoy it. Because it shows us what we’re capable of.” The kid who was inspired to be the best that he could be is just passing it on.