Nonstop suspense
Daveed Diggs all aboard for TNT’s take on ‘Snowpiercer’
Daveed Diggs’ got a career blast with his Tony win in Broadway’s “Hamilton” and hasn’t stopped since, with recurring roles in “The Get Down,” “Black-ish” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”
Now Diggs, 38, stars opposite Jennifer Connelly in TNT’s ambitious “Snowpiercer,” a series adaptation of Oscar winner (“Parasite”) Bong Joon Ho’s acclaimed 2013 sci-fi thriller.
Set when the world’s become a frozen wasteland, the last of humanity is aboard a gigantic, perpetually moving train, Snowpiercer aka The Great Ark Train.
When a murder is discovered in first class, Diggs’ Andre Layton, the last homicide detective on now-inhospitable planet Earth, is brought from the lowly dregs at the very end of the train to meet the ruling class and solve the murder.
Diggs is unabashedly enthusiastic about “Snowpiercer.” “It’s just a wild world to explore, man. It’s a contained system but it’s so expansive.
“The great thing about playing Layton is he’s been stuck in the tail for as long as they’ve been on the train until the series starts. So it’s all new to him.
“There’s this great element of getting to experience what this train really is all the time. There is so much learning going on. I guess I like that about Layton,
how he processes information.
“I also like that he is constantly having to adapt to his new information.”
As to Bong’s film versus TNT’s take, “It’s not a different beast. I think they are different stories from the same universe.
“The incredibly impressive thing that director Bong managed to do was take a format that’s essentially a heist, right? From the tail of the train to the engine, his movie never slows down. The action is really pumping the whole time.
“You still learn a bunch about the social hierarchies on this train and get a real sense of the society and how class is dictating the laws of the train. It’s brilliant what he’s managed to do with that.
“The luxury we have on TV is we can hang out with each class.
“There’s enough time spent with all the characters so that we understand their motivation — and that even further complicates this idea of class and a closed ecosystem.
“And the stakes are so high because we’re talking about survival and how does your quest for justice fit into that?”
“Snowpiercer” plows through ice, mountains of snow and unsettled and increasingly angry passengers.
“The questions that it raises is, like most good art,” Diggs said, “a way to raise way more questions than it answers.
“That was my favorite thing about it.”