Daveed Diggs on The Little Mermaid, Racist Backlash and Hamilton

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Hmm. It’s a crab. Not much emotional real estate on that face was Daveed Diggs’ reaction when he first saw footage of Sebastian, the calypsonian crustacean he voices in Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. Additionally, Disney previously criticized the lack of animal emotions in its 2019 live-action remake of The Lion King. But when I saw Sebastian in motion, smiled Diggs, I was surprised at how expressive he is. [The director] Rob Marshall gave it great comedic timing, good rhythm. I love, love, love the way he pops out of a hat when he sings Kiss the Girl

For the affable 41-year-old actor and rapper who made a name for himself in Hamilton, creating the dual roles of Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson and spitting a groundbreaking 6.3 words per second on Broadway voicing one of the stars of a $40 million Disney movie is just the latest in a series of unlikely breaks in a career trajectory that must seem pretty weird if you’re not sitting in my head. These breaks include hip-hop group Horrorcore Clipping; co-writing and co-starring in the brilliant 2018 independent film Blindspotting (dealing with racial tensions in modern America); then co-wrote the spin-off TV series, which just returned to Starz for a second series last month.

The all-new Mermaid, loosely based on Hans Christian Andersens’ fairy tale about a mermaid who falls in love with a human prince, and following in the footsteps of the 1989 animated classic, isn’t groundbreaking. At two hours and 15 minutes (an hour longer than the original) it drags a bit. And after Disney’s recent attempts to include characters of varying shapes and sizes, the mermaid princesses have all returned to classic Barbie proportions (I’ve seen the Mattel collection) and the only woman with a girth is the villain. But Ursula the Sea Witch is played with infectious bioluminescent glee by Melissa McCarthy, and the underwater iridescence is very soothing to the eyes. No one will come out of this movie blown away, but you’ll come out of it feeling like a trip to a $200 million aquarium.

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Dressed to match Mermaid merch in an aquamarine suit and shiny turquoise hair, Diggs is impossible to miss as his Guardians at Mouse Corp guide him to me after the premiere in London. But for a guy famous for his high-speed syllables, he speaks and moves surprisingly slowly like a man underwater. He gestures in slight amazement at the glowing promotional seascape that surrounds us as he explains how unlikely his current stardom was while growing up in Oakland, California, where there was no real industry entertainment, nothing we can watch.

The quiet son of Barbara (a white Jewish social worker) and Dontes (an African-American bus driver), Diggs grew up poor but much loved. His mother chose the name David because it means beloved, and his father changed the spelling. He attended Hebrew school but opted out of a Bar Mitzvah, telling the Broadway Buzz that as a kid with many mixed-race friends he identified with being Jewish, but I also kissed my father’s side.

Most of the time, though, he identified as a little weirdo, he tells me. He dates a tendency to operate on his own agenda to his resistance to appearing in a preschool play. I must have only been four or five years old, but I didn’t want to do it. The teachers said: You have to do something. So I said, OK then, I’m going to do a gym routine with my dad. Because I liked walking around town balancing on my father’s shoulders. So I forced my father to come to school with me and do gymnastics in front of the class.

He’s laughing. But my parents were always like that: supportive even if they were sometimes disconcerted. I was a busy kid in high school, arriving at 7 a.m. with my saxophone for a jazz band, then after school I practiced on the track, then I got Ivy League training on an athletic scholarship and breaking Brown University hurdle records, then continuing to rehearsals for independent theater projects My parents always encouraged me.

It was Diggss’ dad who took him to see the original The Little Mermaid movie in 1989. I remember standing in line with him and a whole bunch of kids outside the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, laughing Scuttle the seagull set. The film marked a return to successful animated musical features for Disney. On the other side of America, it would make such an impression on future Hamilton writer Lin Manuel Miranda (also nine at the time) that he would stand up on his desk and sing the Oscar-winning song from Sebastian crabs Under the Sea for his class, and later named his firstborn son after the crustacean.

While Diggs and Miranda would go on to write screenplays that questioned racial divisions in modern America, it’s worth remembering that beyond the royal romance plot, The Little Mermaid is about two different cultures (underwater and earthly) learning to overcome their mutual ignorance. , fear and distrust of each other. Judging by the racist backlash that followed Disney’s casting of black actor Halle Bailey as the star of their remake, it was a message that went through the minds of many fans of the original.

More than 1.5 million people clicked a thumbs down on the movie’s trailer last year. A Twitter user bleached Baileys skin with CGI. Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh went so far as to argue that scientifically it doesn’t make much sense to have someone with darker skin live at the bottom of the ocean. If anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, it should actually be translucent.

Diggs is behind the dual role of Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton (Picture: Corey Nickols/Getty)

In February, Bailey credited Beyonce with helping her float above controversy. As a black person, you expect that and it’s not really a shock anymore, she said. The fact that I get to represent all of these little black and brown boys and girls is really special to me because I know if I had that when I was younger it would have completely changed my outlook on life.

Today, Diggs gets emotional when talking about Bailey. Halle is an incredible generational talent, he says. People forget she was only 18 when she was cast as Ariel and she handled it all with he shakes his head in wonder, such grace.

Around the time of Blindspotting’s release, Diggs opened up about the racism he experienced in his youth. He was first arrested by police when he was 16, five days after getting his driver’s license. He was arrested 36 more times in his 20s and in his 30s he was ripped off his bike and thrown against a fence by police. These events continue to occur, he said. It doesn’t change. And so you live with it.

Just two days after this violent encounter with the police, Diggs moved from Los Angeles to New York to work on Hamilton. His friendship with Lin-Manuel Miranda (who wrote four new songs for the new Little Mermaid) dates back to when he worked as a substitute in Oakland. I was only in Hamilton because Lin’s good friend Anthony ended up filling in for the same class due to a clerical error, he explains. To pass the time, we started rapping with the kids, doing freestyle with them. I brought Anthony home and we realized we were both rappers and actors as well as teachers. He invited me to join Freestyle Love Supreme, where I met Lin. Ten years later, Lin wrote Hamilton and there was a part for me.

In fact, there were two parts, allowing Diggs to play first as the revolutionary Marquis de Lafeyette and later as the swaggering Thomas Jefferson, flipping musical references from Shakespeare to Tupac with dazzling flair.

Although Jefferson is the role he’s best known for, Diggs has often said he’s most proud of the work he did on Blindspotting, which races to a crescendo in which his character waves a gun. in the face of a white cop while delivering a high-octane rap about fear and prejudice. I tell Diggs that after my teenage son watched Blindspotting, he told me he was relieved he wasn’t living in America with all the guns and racism. I had to sit down for a conversation about how the UK might not have that many guns, but we have our own issues with racism. Diggs nods. This may not be the place to get into the complexities, but when all of the Meghan Markle stuff was going on, when THAT moment happened, a lot of the comments were: I don’t know what family she was thinking to marry.

As for cultural sensitivity, Diggs admits he still worries about being accused of cultural appropriation over Sebastian’s Caribbean accent. But he assures me he’s done his research, settling on a mix of Jamaican and Trinidadian accents because Sebastian is an underwater crab, not an island in particular. I’ve been taking Calypso lessons since the end [Trinadadian playwright] Tony Hall because I wanted Under the Sea to be like those contemporary calypso songs, which were political songs to activate votes or educational songs with a dot. Sebastian was trying to teach Ariel a lesson and so I wanted there to be that vibe.

As I walked out of the room, Diggs reminds me that the whole point of this new Mermaid movie (which features mermaids of all ethnicities) is for people to see themselves in it. He smiles and raises his hands, making a pair of crab claws. I hope I understood correctly.

The Little Mermaid is in theaters May 26.

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