Star double ACT
After 20 years of inactive lifestyle it’s time to hit Jim hard
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, laughing. “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 on-screen chemistry that gives the film its energy. That chemistry, in turn, is fuelled by a nearly twodecade friendship and a creative synergy that 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 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 crossmedium — 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 very much 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. “That might as well be a 50-year gap,” Casal quips.
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.
Back in 2009, when they started the project, Oscar Grant had just been killed by a San Francisco transit officer. “His face was everywhere,” says Diggs. “There were rallies and protests and riots.”
It became a key element in early drafts.
The pair wondered how their idea would fly. “It’s a hardsell, a race-politics comedydrama that’s in verse,” says Casal. “But it’s the movie we wanted to make.”
LIVES CHANGED
The project came close to being made a few times, and then didn’t, for various reasons over the years. Meanwhile, their lives changed.
“In the early days, it was the two of us huddled over one laptop,” Diggs says. “Long drives up and down the I-5 between Oakland and LA, trying to impress [producers Jess and Keith Calder] and pretend we knew how to write a script.”
Casal recalls nights in LA 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 suddenly Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton came up for Diggs. They figured it would be a quick project for a few months. It turned out to be — well, Hamilton.
The duo makes clear that Hamilton wasn’t the reason the film got made. But Diggs’ rising fame has made it a lot easier to sell the film.
The film screened on opening day at Sundance. What was most gratifying, both men say, is how eager people were to discuss it afterward — and argue.
“The best works of art are ones you come away from and want to talk about,” Diggs says.
The two have lots more going on. “I think we just cherish it,” Casal says of the partnership. — AP