Interview with Daveed Diggs from the Broadway show Hamilton
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| Interview with Daveed Diggs in 7x7 Magazine |
Well, he's back, and this time with a Grammy. Diggs is an Oakland hip hop artist/actor who's currently starring in the hit musical Hamilton on Broadway. He won a 2016 Grammy award for his performance on the Hamilton cast album, and 7x7 Magazine recently published my interview with Daveed Diggs. The 7x7 interview is just an excerpt, and I've put the full interview below.
Meet the Oakland-Native Who Stars in Hamilton
Interview by Matt Werner
Transcription by Korin McGinty
Broadway’s breakout musical Hamilton is coming to San Francisco in 2017. Daveed Diggs, a rapper who grew up between Oakland, Albany, and El Cerrito, plays two of the leads: Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. He’s performed for countless celebrities and political elites, including President Obama twice, the Clintons, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and anyone who has managed to get a ticket to the hottest show in New York, where tickets on the secondary market routinely sell for over $1,000. So, how did this son of a former DJing Jewish mother and a MUNI bus driving father, who had never acted in New York before, come to star in the hottest show in New York City? We caught up with him in Manhattan and asked. |
Daveed Diggs portrait by Laura Tomlinson
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DAVEED DIGGS: Anthony Veneziale was trying to start a West Coast version of Freestyle Love Supreme, and we had both been accidentally called to substitute teach the same class in Marin, and I ended up giving him a ride home. That’s how I first got connected with Lin-Manuel Miranda and this group of people I’m working with now in Hamilton. For the Super Bowl in 2013, ESPN asked Freestyle Love Supreme to do some rapping on SportsNation about sports celebrities. And, they didn’t really want freestyle. This is write your verse and learn it really fast and then go do it in one take live. Which I’ve spent years doing in the Bay with Rafael Casal.
And how did rapping with Freestyle Love Supreme lead to you being cast in Hamilton?
DIGGS: While working on the Super Bowl gig Tommy Kail director of Hamilton had a reading of this play coming up and there was a lot of rap material that needed to be learned quickly. So they asked me to come out to Vassar in July, 2013 to do the first full reading of Hamilton. They sent me the music, and in my head I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do this, and I’m also never letting anybody else touch this part.’ It was too much fun, and it was too good. I told Tommy to call me every time they had a reading, and I would make it work. So I’d been doing that until they invited me to the workshop in 2014, offered me the part for the Off-Broadway run at the Public Theater, and then we made the jump to Broadway in 2015.
What impressed me seeing Hamilton both Off-Broadway and on Broadway is the sheer energy of the piece, and also how you make these historic people come alive as hip and contemporary.
DIGGS: Part of the thing about this piece is that we’re trying to take away the distance between us and the founding fathers. So, part of that is about allowing yourself to come through in these characters, and you taking as much ownership over this story as the character would have taken ownership over this story.
Everybody is asked to do so much and everybody has put so much more than they were asked to. It’s kind of a crazy feeling to go through every night. Every once in awhile you get to do something that reminds you why you do a thing, and this is one of those things. We all come out of this bigger than ourselves.
What will Bay Area audiences like about Hamilton?
DIGGS: The show is super multiethnic, but it’s never commented on, that just is the way it is. All the founding fathers are played by people of color, in fact all of the parts except for King George, are played by people of color. And that sounds like it should be a thing, but the real thing about it is that after the first two seconds of the play, it doesn’t matter at all.
And the same thing with the rap music in it right? It is ludicrous to me that it has sort of taken this long for rap music to become a standard part of the theatrical vocabulary because it’s a standard part of every other vocabulary. It’s on commercials all the time; it’s just what popular music sounds like. People come up to us afterwards and be like, ‘That was amazing. The rap music belonged so well, and I understood every word.’ Of course you understood every word--you hear it all day long. So I think those are the things about the show that, at least from my experience in the Bay I would find interesting. In a place that prides itself on multiculturalism, this play really embodies that.
What Bay Area hip hop aesthetic do you bring to your performance?
DIGGS: In the Bay we breed nimble-tongued rappers, and we also over enunciate. We hit our R’s really hard--that’s just what rappers sound like in the Bay. When Lin-Manuel Miranda first started working with me on this show he was like, ‘Great, I can write things that are faster than I would be capable of doing them because you can do that.’ So I get a lot of really good fast rap moments. I get some stuff that really plays to my strengths.
Being from the Bay and working with people like Rafael Casal, that’s why I can do that. It’s because that’s what rap music has always sounded like to me. At the same time while Lin was listening to A Tribe Called Quest and Biggie, I was listening to E-40 and to Keak Da Sneak. These were my major influences at the time. It allows me to bring some of that onto the table.
Would you go as far to say you bring a Hyphy influence to your portrayal of Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson?
DIGGS: I probably bring a Hyphy influence to everything that I do, to be honest. So I guess it is fair to say, but I probably bring that same influence to like, you know, getting a sandwich.
In our prior conversation about being an Oakland artist in New York City, you said “You take Oakland with you.” Could you elaborate on that?
DIGGS: I don’t get to do Hamilton without knowing Rafael Casal. Or Bill Hutson and Chinaka Hodge, none of this happens without me knowing these people. And none of it happens without Oakland, that’s the city that I take with me everywhere that I go. And I’m very proud to be from there. It’s nice to be in a room full of New Yorkers and to be from Oakland, and to be holding my own and bringing an energy into the pot that they didn’t really know existed because we’re so overlooked in terms of being a real viable commercial arts community. But it is. So many great artists come from there. So I’m gonna keep shouting it all the time. It’s kinda my thing.
Read the interview on 7x7
