In a long chat with British GQ, Lin-Manuel Miranda talks about the Hamilton movie, but also about how he is coping with the quarantine life and the projects he is working on at the moment.
In his head, Lin-Manuel Miranda has an alternative timeline of what he would be doing right now. The 40-year-old would have recently finished filming his directorial debut, for one, the Netflix adaption of the Broadway musical Tick, Tick… Boom!, which survived just ten days of shooting before everything shut down. Right now, he says, he should be in the edit.
Instead, he’s on a Zoom call, talking to GQ from his home about a filmed version of Hamilton, which wasn’t due out for another year, and he’s apologising for the fact that it doesn’t say “Lin-Manuel Miranda” on his screen, but “Lin-Sebastian’s dad”, as it “defaults to the time I did a parent-teacher conference”.
Hamilton, for those who’ve somehow missed one of the key cultural moments of the last decade, is the smash-hit Broadway musical that single-handedly made Broadway musicals cool. Written by and initially starring Miranda, it managed to do it, somewhat improbably looking back, by rapping about the Founding Fathers and specifically about a plucky upstart by the name of Alexander Hamilton.
The show itself was nominated for a record-setting 16 Tony Awards, winning eleven along with a Pulitzer, and made Miranda an instant superstar. He’s gone on to Hollywood leading roles – he played chimney sweep Jack in the 2018 Disney remake Mary Poppins Returns – along with seeing his debut musical, In The Heights, set for a big-screen adaption next year.
For now, it’s Hamilton that will be arriving on our screens, courtesy of Disney+. Recorded over two of Miranda’s last performances in the musical, it was rushed forward after lockdown struck. “Once it became clear there was not going to be any theatre for the foreseeable future,” he says, “we all kind of pivoted and said, ‘Oh, this is actually an opportunity to remind people of the power of theatre when there is none.’”
Check the full conversation under the cut.
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