Daveed Diggs On "Hamilton" | AOL BUILD

following us to revolution there is no more status quo but the Sun comes up in the world still spins I help Lafayette draft a declaration then I said I gotta go gotta be in Monticello now the work at home begins what did I miss Virginia my home sweet home I want to give you a kid sold-out crowd at AOL village oh my god what's up I was I'd never listen to that song that was a little bit terrifying I was great though meanwhile I'm backstage doing the choreography civvy Diggs you are a rapper you were an actor you were a poet you were an activist you are Oakland dish you are a Tony Awards nominee I want to talk about your evolution in all elements of that word but first let's talk about this week's news the Tony nominations word you are nominated as Best Featured actor in a Musical yes there are five actors in that category three of them are from Hamilton yes what does it mean to you to be a Tony nominee um its it is the craziest thing I think at I don't really know what to make of it is the is the honest truth of it I'm so honored it's um it was not a thing I was looking for it was not a thing that I you know and it's not a it wasn't it wasn't I wasn't gonna for this for this Tony nomination it was it I didn't grow up sort of hoping to one day win a Tony uh particularly in a musical um you know I mean I did this only musical I've ever done I don't know so much of this whole experience is me not knowing what the hell I'm doing so um it has been so kind of humbling to just be recognized as even a part of this community of Broadway which the more I delve into it the more I realize is such a really wonderful community to be a part of everybody who are my colleagues now are such good people such good hard-working people who are really dedicated their lives to bringing art at the highest level to the world on on the the biggest stage that a theatre practitioner gets to do it on so I feel very honored to be sort of recognised as a as a part of that world it feels like very official he knows like I got a like I got my card or something that was like what I could say I'm a Broadway actor now or something I don't know it's crazy you earned it you deserve it I'm gonna take I'm gonna call you out a little bit on saying you weren't going for it because in 2012 you released a music video for a song called fresh out of the hood whoo and there is a lyric in there oh yeah yeah right and they want to say that the bottoms is the bottom but I'm calling at the top they feel me then I got him on that Morrison music for this Tony I'm pursuing active food for your amusement and you don't know what I'd do it I do it for my town yeah that was a you were pursuing a Tony back then man that line to me was absolutely about pursuing Toni Morrison's greatness as a writer and it was a way but in the lyrics it spelled with a Y and Toni nor Toni Morrison wrote those lyrics down I didn't write this down as that's the best rap genius y'all got to take that up with them I did not I wrote those on a crumpled piece of paper that's been burnt um but yeah yeah for me I mean that man you really did your research Adam yeah I was living in West Oakland at the time I've always been a stage actor so it was a way to sort of equate my my kind of I was really nerdy out over Sula at the time because the the characters in that book live in a town on the top of a hill that's referred to as the bottoms and I was living in West Oakland at the time which is also referred to as the bottoms and so I was I was really into this this Toni Morrison duality that was going on with my own life and I was also doing a bunch of plays at the time so I thought it was a good way to equate my theater work with my rapper work with my love of Toni Morrison is kind of like nerdy rapper rabbit-hole that I go down all the time that I never expect anybody to call me on cuz I don't expect anybody to listen to my music oh well I will just be the first to say that your music is fantastic and it's clear that the rap skills that you developed that you use in in Hamilton especially for a song like guns and chips which is the fastest rap song I've ever heard you developed over the course of years with your rap outfit clipping yes which I would like to just congratulate you on can you clear something up clipping spelled with or without vowels clipping so yeah clipping the band is spelled with vowels just like clipping is spelled we prefer it not to be capitalized we also prefer there to be a period at the end of it but that really really with copy editors so we don't we also don't mind when it gets ignored and that our last album was was are not self-titled album that was called I love your shirt by the way thank you so much for wearing that is a clipping shirt in the program um that's crazy but uh yeah our last album was titled ClpP ng C well the not-self title yeah it was a wolf so there's this silly rule that we have where I don't write in the first person yeah I was gonna ask you yeah so it was our way of trying to sort of slyly point that out by taking the eyes out of clipping it's not that clever but it was kind of cool nobody got it either so it was a total failure from a marketing perspective that did not help us at all and you also are doing some solo rap music as well right yes yeah all the time um yeah I'm trying I'm trying to put something else out since 2012 um you've been a little busy I've been busy but I'm also just slow I just I'm slow to write and I'm and I get nervous I get nervous about you know if I'm gonna put something out in the world I want to be able to stand behind it I want to be able to live I say all the time it's a great thing that all of this attention happened for Hamilton for this show that I am really that I have been in love with from day one because it could it could have been anything else right I could have been in the show I really didn't like that much um but it's very easy to stand behind that product so I'm sort of the same way with my music is if I'm trying to put something out I want to make sure that in 10 years I'm not gonna be like oh my god oh that was so dumb which is gonna happen anyway well that's what evolution is all about yeah I'm interested in your evolution as specifically when it comes to education because I read that your very first performance was doing a dramatic reading of a poem when you were in elementary school yeah Eames like the intersection between music and poetry and education never really ended for me for you from that point forward yeah I so I've always been teaching actually when I went to college I ended I ended up being a theatre major but it was sort of by default because I had looked around and it finished them I finished the concentration we concentrated at Brown we don't major it it's all we can do just to focus so we can say but I but when I went there I had these sort of lofty goals of creating this this arts and education thing I was teaching all the time there too I had already started kind of teaching in middle schools going back and doing poetry workshops in middle schools when I was in high school and when I got to brown I was gonna I was going to do this thing I was teaching in Central Falls High School and working with a program called arts/literacy program that was all about teaching reading skills through theater games really through entering text through a sequence of sort of improv games and then treating the the text as as monologue and and really like trying to learn how to read by learning how to really take on the weight of the of the text on your person and in your life and it was really it's a really cool program it still exists so I was doing a lot of teaching through that too but then it ended up being really complicated to actually get a major approved so I didn't do that but I have I went back home so Oakland was teaching a lot I sort of developed this rap curriculum that I was teaching in a bunch of local middle schools through a lot of funding through the marsh Youth Theater at the time was writing grants for me to be able to pay me to go teach in schools there which was great in San Francisco and yeah I have always you know there are a few teachers everybody probably has them like over the course of your life there are a few teachers who just change everything I hope I hope all of us have a few of them and I certainly did and oh man one of them came to the show not too long ago my seventh grade teacher Miss Davis and her husband who was my PE teacher mr. Uchiyama came to the show a few weeks ago and I had even I used to go visit her even when I was back from college and back like teaching around I used to go visit her all the time she was that teacher for me she was the person who really championed my writing I used you know she would find any excuse for me to write some weirdo little story and let me read it to the class she made me feel like the words that I came up with the words that I Ament it as opposed to the ones that I was reading in other places had value to them and I really um I give the credit to that for her so it was so great to have her come out and see the show at a hangout backstage and um yeah it was just amazing but anyway there's this you have this opportunity and this responsibility as a teacher I think to try and give students a sense that they can accomplish the tasks that you are trying to do whatever that task is and to not dumb the task down in order to make sure that they feel that that's not the point the point is that we're going to work on this until you are able to do it because it's that's what it's really about is the you know those of us who are fortunate enough to have been told we were great enough in our lives get to have this wonderful period in adolescence where we feel invincible you know where you feel like you can do anything where you run out and make plays with your friends because you think that like you're really great actors and directors and that people should totally come see these and you like all of your you know friends and family come see these horrible productions of things that you do but you feel so amazing for that that's important I think that's really important and it having that totally changed my life and so it's been really important for me to try to give that back because I I don't know I don't really know where I'd be had I not had those moments in my life where someone was really championing me and helping me learn skills along the way that I probably wouldn't realize until later but really just telling me that my voice was worth using I've also heard you say that you stopped believing in talent a long time ago but it's all about the hard work yeah yeah I mean you know there are people who are more or less sort of predisposed to certain things right but if you if you really work at something you get better so uh man I I went to I went to Berkeley High School and there's an incredible jazz program at Berkeley high school there always has been and I was playing the saxophone at the time and I was sort of good enough to get into the jazz band but I was never gonna solo there you know everybody was so much better than me and a lot of the cats I was playing with there are professional jazz musicians now and one of my one of my good friends Ambrose a Camus Suri who's on Blue Note right now and two of the most incredible albums you will ever hear in your life you should go listen to Ambrose's stuff he we were somewhere we were sitting at a bar like a bunch of years ago in Oakland and I was saying to him that I hoped one day to be as good at anything as he was at playing the trumpet and he turned to me and was like that's just practice I practice a lot and I am really good like that's a direct correlation you like being a good person is hard being happy is hard those are things that there's not that necessarily there's not necessarily a direct correlation to that finding happiness in your life is a much more difficult thing than being good at anything if you put in the time you'll be good at it so and you look around at the people when you look at you know when I look at my cast these are people who have worked incredibly hard their whole lives to do this thing all of us you know whatever sort of our our entryway into this world is those dancers have put in there whatever it is ten thousand hours of dancing but it's really somewhere in the lines of like tens of hundreds of thousands of hours of dancing and that's why they can do what they do so if you dedicate the time to something you get better at it that's how our brains work we learn things by repetition and by sort of figuring out how things sit on us so that's what it is so in that last answer you reference both Berkeley and Oakland you I'm also from Oakland if you couldn't figure it out yeah from my shirt your hat is the Oakland logo the tree and can you show everybody your socks I got Oakland II socks I landed Jacque see that game right now Janaka Hodge gave me these you don't know who Tanaka Hodgins you should can you talk about the importance of your roots and giving back to those roots as you become sort of a global superstar if you'll forgive me for the hyperbole yeah yeah I think you know Oakland is the city that made me and I owe a lot to the just sort of the culture of that place the you know I mean it's it's a melting pot in the real sense of the word right at least it was when we were there and that seems be rapidly-changing - and that's another thing for a lot of artists I think of my generation who are from theirs we are sort of nervous about how quickly the gentrification is happening how the tech industry is really like just you know it's all San Francisco's gone right sorry San Franciscans but like it's not it's dead right you can't get a burrito in the mission anymore come on you know you can't you literally can't afford it and you can't afford to live there so you can't go there maybe I can afford to go there a o/l was that way you can afford to go there Hamilton nah man I don't know I don't that's the misconception - let's not get into that spicy - say I cannot afford to live as there is disco and I can't really afford to live in Oakland is the honest truth of it my both my dad was born and raised in Oakland he just moved out he lives in Richmond now he can't afford to live there my mom moved out seven years ago she can't afford to live there you know the the so the the sort of disparity of income that all existed in in a relatively small area was one of the things that made Oakland great the fact that it had managed to find space for very wealthy people and for very poor people and everything in between and like a really like robust middle-class like a very large Menino everybody was middle-class was what made one of the things that made Oakland really great and you know what progress is progress and and property taxes property prices go up and everything goes up and it's part of the deal but it is sad and it's it's scary a little bit so I do I do have a fair amount of fear for kind of the future of my des city or that kids from there aren't getting to grow up the way that I grew up and maybe that's good but maybe it's not you know I don't really qualified to make a value judgment on it because I don't live there right now so I try to check in with it every time I visit and and see what just take the temperature of the place but I am very concerned with always giving back to that city and always shouting it out because it did did make me who I am but then also wanting to make sure that I preserve some of the stories about the way it was to grow up there well you have definitely given back to the school kids there's a video mind that you collaborated with amongst other people Marshawn Lynch the football player that was actually created for and by the students in the Oakland Unified School District and I know that Hamilton is doing a lot to bring this show which is as everyone knows it's impossible to get a ticket yet through grants through the activism and the impetus of the cast and the creative team and the producers 20,000 school kids are going to get to see the show for $10 yeah it's the it's actually my favorite thing about the show it actually is and like sorry not sorry that you can't get in to see those those student matinees because they are the energy is the the craziest thing I have ever experienced before and so we had our first one and I was sick I was sick as a dog I was throwing up I woke up vomiting which is a weird thing I don't know you know I had like woke up with a stomach virus and called Tommy Kail our director and said I don't think I can't I can't come today I'm sorry and the kids were gonna be there at 10:00 a.m. performing there so there's a whole curriculum there's a whole Hamilton curriculum that has been distributed to the the schools who are coming as part of this initiative and representatives from each school were selected to perform their final projects from this curriculum on our stage and I wanted to be there so bad and I was just sick and lying in bed and I was like well I could either be sick here or sick watching these kids so I got up I caught a lift and I took my acid theatre and um and I was so inspired by those kids that I did both shows that day like actually walking offstage and vomiting in between in between things but after after seeing the sort of bravery and like the heart that those kids put into their performances and getting up on a Broadway stage as a high schooler in front of thirteen hundred other high schoolers kids you don't know can you imagine as a child and performing things that they wrote themselves that are based in history that are incorporating their own stories and using their own voices and choreography and music and beatboxing and rapping and all of this stuff and I was like oh you're not gonna go on stage do you feel those sick-ass you know so it was uh uh it was so it was such a I'm so happy I went it was the best reminder for really why you do this because that I mean that the energy that they gave in their performances and then the energy that they gave while we were on stage are the things that's what keeps you doing it is this that's the thing about theatre that you don't get from anything else it's this it's this it's like I can look out I don't see very well but I can see house faces and everybody else like I can see that you are human beings out there and I can feel I can feel your energy coming back to via that's that's why you do it it's an energy exchange that it means something it means something that you are here with all of the things that you had to go through today to get here whatever that is that means you know you had to register in advance to come here that's that's a crazy thing that you did you're you know you had to plan to do this you bring all of that with you and those kids brought their whole lives with them onto that stage and every day on that stage we get to bring our whole lives with us and tell the story of the founding of this country and how cool is that yeah I want to turn the the mics over to the audience for some questions but first I want to give you an opportunity to talk about some of the things that you're doing next I know I've seen you on a couple of guest starring roles on TV I heard that you're going to be working with Baz Luhrmann yeah man yeah so this show the get-down that is coming out I have I have a part in I can't talk too much about it but it's um but I can't tell you that working with bears is the craziest thing I've done that dude brings a kind of energy onto the set that is like I don't even know you can't you can't you don't even know what you're doing he just starts shouting things and you just and it just and camera people are running around and they're building new track while we're shooting and and there's you know extras are jumping and screaming and you're it's the it's the best it was um yeah the couple times we have worked together been the the really just eye opening experiences of of entered energy exchange man that guy gets that and so it's no wonder that the things that he produces look and feel the way they do and can elicit that kind of response cuz you create that energy in the room he captures he gets all the people positioned in the right place to capture it right and then it translates that is just an incredible artist at work so I feel very fortunate to be a part of it and the show I can't I've only seen you know I've only seen a rough cut of the first episode and I was just I was hooked anyway when that's going to be available for us no I think you've gotten us like drawn in there you have no idea that's that Netflix hype man they just put it out when they won't haha and we love them for it right like you love that let's turn it over to the audience for some questions hi I want to know do you think with the success of Hamilton future play writers and producers Wormold their plays and musicals after Hamilton and do you think you could rap faster than twister ah I was just talking about that on the way and twisted not the future of theater the as so I I think are you are you a writer yeah are you gonna I mean it's up to you really right like you're the future of the American theater like that the funny thing about the ripple effect of Hamilton is it's the kids it's those student matinees right I mean it's the it's the younger folks who are coming to see it now that the side that everybody can sort of look at it now however much they want and try to you know it is it if you look around Broadway right now it's clear that sort of like diverse casting choices are making money which is an important thing to remember that we are you know people are making money so I think you know it's impossible not to notice that and hopefully that that is a trend that can continue but in terms of you know what makes Hamilton what it is is the care that it took is the care that Lynne took in writing it he created and then the care that every person along the way took in putting the right group together so that method can be mimicked but I hope it's not gonna be you know we don't need a Hamilton sequel unless it's like a Lafayette like Ezra yeah we we already need that we I think but I hope that if if other writers are inspired if you are inspired by it and you decide to use that in your own writing that's what dictates the future of it you know I talk to kids all the time about this particularly kids who are artists right now but I've known Lynn for 10 years that's why I'm in Hamilton I had auditioned for Hamilton I would not be in hell was it right like to go up and like sing 16 bars of a show tune for Alex lakum or like no I'm so tempted to ask you to sing 16 bars I don't know 16 bars of a show - it literally couldn't do it I'm never auditioned for a musical in my life I don't know a showtune the only musical I've ever done the only songs I know are ones in Hamilton and I am NOT singing wait for it as Leslie's voice scares me to death so um but yeah like you know that those are friends of mine and we are collaborators so the people you're collaborating with right now if you're artists those are the lifelong relations are clipping my band is with you know that was one of those band members was my best friend William Hudson was my best friend in third grade we met in third grade we've been friends since then and just started making music together four years ago and in the last three years have been able to tour the whole world together playing it like the shittiest bars all over the world uh-huh and how amazing is that right but those are the people your collaborators are the ones that you make right now you have to wait for someone to tell you this is a good person to work with like I'm honored to work with Baz and life would have continued had I never worked with Pez right how's it going man hey I'm really excited to show hopefully I can get a ticket within the next thirty years or so but you talked about rapping and being an actor I'm curious do you approach both things in the same way or do you find that they both require different levels of like thinking or anything oh that's interesting um I mean I think the the attention to craft is is the same right and I think and I guess for me they're both about solving problems right writing a song is essentially a biz is a it's a proud it's like a math problem it's like I need this effect here's the beat I want to use this is what I want to write about how do they like this Plus this equals what and how do I tweak that to make it something that is eliciting the response I want if I want people to like feel like they should get real drunk right now how do I do that you know one of the words I need to say to accomplish that rap life and but you know if I want people to sit and really listen to this this very sort of introspective story I'm telling about about how my dad is a bus driver like what are the what are the choices that I have to make in order to make that happen and acting is the same way right you're given a script is a is a road map to an entire life of a person like your kids is your characters roadmap so the the tools that you have or whatever is in the script and you sort of figure out that plus whatever you have in yourself what are the pieces of that that you use to elicit the response that you need to do the thing about theatre that isn't for me the thing about acting that is more turned up is the focus on storytelling because ultimately like your job is to tell whatever part of the story you are telling so to complete your characters arc to make sure that everything that you do fits within the parameters of the show that you're working out of the hole so that you're your you and your company and your cast can tell the the larger story so that it's just a little more story focused whereas songs for me are told in briefer you know three to four minutes or however long the song is stories unless you're doing a concept album which this next clipping I would may or may not be I can't work am not really at liberty to say oh you're such a tease that was the worst so entering the lottery has become a daily activity as I'm sure everyone in this room pause after I wake up so my question is before you started doing this project was there a fact about Alexander Hamilton that you didn't know prior to this musical any facts about Alexander Hamilton I did not know a single I knew no I knew that he was shot by Aaron Burr because that first got milk commercial I knew that uh Armour I knew that um and that was the excited no he was on the $10 bill I don't think and I knew nothing about him before I started working on this do you uh encounter a lot of $2 bills in your damn MP will be going to the bank to get $2 bills to have me sign which is so cute haha so flattering you've got time for one more brother Diggs thanks for joining us today You certainly have an intriguing story so I was curious to know if you'd be willing to share with us any struggle that you may have encountered pursuing acting maybe you had to choose acting over something else not necessarily rapping but maybe a relationship or just something more personal where you weren't sure if you were going to do that and then you forge through that's interesting um I mean that I've been thinking about this a lot the last in the last couple of days to the the choice to be an artist of any kind I think really requires a community you know you need a community around you so when I when the Tony nominations came out I I was asleep and I was woken up by my brother and my best friend breaking into my house they videotaped it by the way you can find it on YouTube it's very for sure it's on my Instagram page because they also broke in to my Instagram and posted it but uh they they broke into my house and jumped on my bed with a bottle of champagne right um which was fun it was great and it was amazing it was so sweet but the thing that that reminded me of is how much everybody has had to sacrifice every buddy in my life has who has made the choice or by virtue of birth is close to me uh has had to sacrifice in order for me to be here right so what you're saying about relationships it is it's hard sometimes to find somebody who who is supportive of you in all of those ways and the choices that you somehow have sometimes I had to make too I have to go be on the road for eight months because this is a piece that really speaks to me and because it's something that I have to do for my career that's that's a difficult thing and it happens all the time right and you know my brother my little brother I went to Brown University my little brother went to Community College because the money wasn't around anymore to send him immediately I mean with the family would have worked it out but he sort of made the choice I'm gonna go to community cut like it's a huge sacrifice that he made really for for me and you know so I am surrounded by those people right uh we grew up very very poor um but I didn't feel I wasn't sad I've said this before I grew up poor I didn't grow up sad um my my parents were not together but I had a very involved mother and father who both made I was the happiest person I felt like I had everything and I I was sort of surrounded by love all the time um so I never I never wanted for anything you know um and I think those experiences like even through hard times being able to even at the hardest time so we don't have any money and like food is scarce but we can tell jokes you know you can laugh your way through things you can go out and play with your kids in the simon Aslam the most incredible thing that my father ever did was always played with me always right um whatever I wanted to do in the morning if he was around like that's what we were doing so it's like I want to go on a hike so we wouldn't climbed up a mountain like that's the best that's the kind of things we did and having that is what makes those hard times I think not so hard because you realize that that's just struggle but your life doesn't have to be sad I've actually I'm I've very rarely been sad for in any sort of deep way for a long time and I've also never been bored in my life as far as I can remember like boredom has never existed for me like my downtime is great I write a song or whatever like I don't have a job okay brick awesome I don't have to go anywhere today that shit's dope yeah so those there is a there there's like a very clear silver lining those hard times which is I don't know I don't have to answer to nobody if you ain't paying me um so you sort of structure your life for me if you know you structure your life to get the most inspiration that you can out of any situation and say yes to the things that feel really really good and for me if you keep pursuing the things that feel good the rest will sort of fall into place and it'll be really really hard at times you ain't gonna have but um it'll come around and at least you won't be sad you won't be miserable you won't be working in a job that you hate you won't be you know like those things are like my friend said happiness is difficult right being good at something is not do the thing you want to get good at and you'll you'll figure out how to get happy I think that is a beautiful place to leave it for the day the BJS thank you so much for being here follow Javeed on twitter at the be big Hamilton musical I'm at Broadway girl NYC and follow at AOL bill before everything that's coming up here in the coming weeks thanks so much thank you

Channel: BUILD Series

Views: 200,338

Rating: 4.9760528 out of 5

Keywords: AOL, AOL Build, Daveed Diggs, Hamilton, Lafayette, Broadway, Hamilton Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda, clipping., In The Heights, Bway, NYC, Alexander Hamilton, Tony Awards, Tony Nominations, King George, jonathan groff, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Rodgers Theatre, favorite fighting frenchman, Laura Heywood, BroadwayGirlNYC

Id: okEV-6V0pfo

Length: 34min 5sec (2045 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2016