THE REAL DEAL
After his revolutionary turn in ‘Hamilton,’ Daveed Diggs shifts focus to his Oakland roots with a film about strife in today’s world
HARD to believe that it’s been two years since Daveed Diggs pulled off his “Hamilton” boots and headed for Hollywood.
Now, several commercials, albums, voiceovers and TV series later — including a juicy role on “Black-ish” — the former Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson has a feature film: Out Friday, “Blindspotting” stars Diggs and Rafael Casal, the high-school friend he wrote it with.
Given the flurry of gigs he’s had since leaving Broadway, you have to wonder where the 36-year-old found the time to write and star in a film. When you tell him that, he laughs.
“It’s been a wild couple of years,” Diggs tells The Post over the phone, fresh from the film’s New York premiere. He’s just visiting: The guy who, in his jobless days, slept on the 2 train when he couldn’t find a couch to crash on now lives in West Hollywood — 350 miles and light-years away from the gritty Oakland, Calif., of his youth, where “Blindspotting” is set and where both Diggs and Casal grew up.
Their rap-filled comedy-drama about race, gentrification and police brutality takes its title from a classic psychology test about perception: Where one person sees a vase, another sees faces.
Diggs’ character, Collin, knows exactly what he’s seen — an unarmed black man gunned down by a cop. But since he’s an ex-con just three days away from the end of probation, who’d believe him, even if he had the courage to come forward?
Diggs says he and Casal started writing the film 10 years ago, huddled over a laptop with a lone pirated copy of the screenwriting program Final Draft. The 2009 police shooting of a young black man named Oscar Grant — later the subject of Ryan Coogler’s 2013 feature “Fruitvale Station” — made them dig in deeper.
“That was the main story in Oakland,” Diggs says. “The
whole town had ‘Oscar’ on their shirts.” But over the years, he says, the protests and riots that followed died down, replaced by “a kind of fatigue.” Even so, the threat of racially charged violence never left.
In one of the movie’s most unnerving scenes, Collin walks down an empty street, a gun he’s taken from a feckless friend in his pocket, as a police car rolls up alongside him.
Diggs knows that feeling of dread. A Brown University graduate, he says he’d been pulled over by police so many times in his 20s that he stopped counting. Luckily, his parents — his white Jewish mother, a DJ turned social-welfare educator, and his African-American father, a bus driver — taught him how to handle himself.
“I don’t remember a time not being aware that I was going to be policed differently than some of my friends,” Diggs says. “It’s the responsibility of any parent who has brown children, and that’s unfortunate.”
A 4-year-old who picks up the gun Collin’s friend left lying around their apartment is the focus of another tense scene. Playing the boy’s mother, Jasmine Cephas Jones, daughter of “This Is Us” star Ron Cephas Jones and once a Schuyler sister in “Hamilton,” erupts into a rage.
Diggs says her screams terrified little Ziggy Baitinger, her on-screen son.
“Ziggy was genuinely scared,” Diggs says. “We came up with a system where we could put these little earwigs [headphones] in his ears and play Justin Bieber music, which is what he really wanted to hear. And between takes, we’d have dance parties, so he felt quite comfortable.”
Diggs is still grappling with the changes in Oakland, where gentrification’s erased much of his past. One shuttered and beloved fast-food place even made it into the film.
“Kwik Way closed down and the building sat empty for many years,” he says. “Then, it had a grand reopening, but the food was weird, upscaled . . . all the burgers came on whole-wheat buns. People were like, ‘What is this? Nobody asked for this!’ ”
There’s no such nostalgia for New York, which Diggs visits too often to miss. He gave up his place in Washington Heights and, aside from the Tony and Grammy awards he won for the show and its album, keeps no “Hamilton” souvenirs.
“I had boxes and boxes of the sweetest fan mail, drawings and stuff, but you can’t move across the country with that,” he says. “Some of it’s probably still hanging at the Richard Rodgers. For a while, they had a memorial wall of former cast members.” Nor does he plan to step into Lafayette’s boots again. “I’ve said everything I had to say about that, in that,” he says. “It’s more interesting to see someone else do it.” Should we worry about Diggs going Hollywood? “Yeah, you should,” he says, laughing. “I’m gonna do a lot of s- -t in Hollywood!”