Digg-ing into a buddy flick
I’M Hamilton’d out. This whole column’s about Alexander.
We start with no dude you’d miss in a crowd. Dav
eed Diggs. His new movie’s “Blindspotting” and he makes Times Square look like a ConEd failure. Big hair, gold-topped teeth, ruffled lavender shirt, greenand-black suit, shiny metalrimmed glasses. Helen Keller could’ve seen him.
Pleasant, easy, smiling, Tony and Grammy winner for playing Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in “Hamilton.” Where’s his awards? Answer: “I’m forgetful. I don’t remember. Maybe in my place in LA.”
OK, so about co-writing “Blindspotting” with co-star
Rafael Casal: “It’s a buddy film. It took 10 years to do. Before ‘Hamilton’ I was a writer who grew up doing poetry. For 10 years we met with producers who tried financing this but didn’t. One of them had made only one single movie at the time.
“When ‘Hamilton’ came along, who thought it would be a success? I said: ‘This’ll be over in six months.’
“This movie we wrote is us. Stuff that happened to our friends. Fiction but based on friends. Some were in the audience when we previewed it in Oakland, Calif.
“A favorite hilarious scene’s in the beginning. It’s a misunderstanding where there’s too many guns which are in the car and comes off like a throwback to the old-time Abbott and Costello humor.
“We wrote on laptops. We passed information back and forth. Many conversations. If we were apart, one of us would send to the other.
“Look, parts of our film seem tough. But today’s world is tough. It deals with probation and that’s a hard trap set up for heroes. The story’s us.”
Types like Tina Fey, Mariska Hargitay, Questlove and Julie Taymor jammed the Angelika Film Center to see this buddy film by Daveed and his buddy Rafael.