In the upcoming independent film “Magic Hour,” Charlie — portrayed by Daveed Diggs — breaks out in a sweat when his lover persuades him to hop on a Ferris wheel with her. Charlie, you see, is afraid of heights and more content keeping his feet firmly planted on terra firma.
That stands in stark contrast to Diggs himself. The Oakland native and Berkeley High School graduate is an accomplished multi-hyphenated actor, rapper and songwriter who has won a Tony, Grammy and Emmy — and even set a record as a hurdler at Brown University.
It seems he has no fear of heights — especially the professional and artistic ones.
Later this month, Diggs’ commitment to creative and artistic expression and his work inspiring future generations will be recognized when the 43-year-old “Hamilton” and “Blindspotting” sensation receives the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s Freedom of Expression honor. The award debuted in 2005 and has been bestowed on innovators such as Kirk Douglas, Lee Grant and Elliot Gould, amongst others.
“It’s really sweet,” Diggs said in an interview with Bay Area News Group in which he discussed his expansive career that includes being part of a three-member hip-hop band, clipping, made up now of dads. Give them a listen; they’re like lightning.
“It’s really gratifying,” Diggs adds. “It’s really nice that it’s back home too.” Diggs these days resides in the Los Angeles area with his partner, actress-musician Emmy Raver-Lampman — whom he met while performing with the original “Hamilton” Broadway cast. The pair have a 1-year-old son.
The festival runs July 17 through Aug. 3 and opens with the documentary “Coexistence, My Ass!” about comedian and activist Noam Shuster-Eliassi. The lineup includes world premieres of “The Feeling Remains,” Bay Area native Sophie Rose’s powerful personal documentary about a ‘90s-era family in crisis, and Oakland director Abby Ginzberg’s “Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold,” an illuminating portrait of the highly influential 20th-century humanitarian.
Diggs is slated to attend the 6 p.m. July 31 screening of “Magic Hour” at the Piedmont Theatre that includes a conversation afterwards.
It was a slam dunk to choose Diggs, says Jewish Film Festival’s executive director Lexi Leban.
“(The award) was really tied up in this idea of how important the arts are to a Democratic society and really honor freedom of expression — both in terms of political artists that take risks and that really foreground challenging ideas and encourage people to think deeply about their perspectives, but also the artistic imagination and artists that really break boundaries in terms of genre breaking, genre bending, and also creating new forms and thinking about new ways of storytelling,” Leban said.
“For us, Daveed Diggs is the embodiment of this award on every level.”
Diggs appreciates those kind words but says he’s just doing what he loves.
“I’ve been making art for a long time – that’s just sort of what I do,” he said. “So statements that seem to encapsulate a body of work, that’s never how I really think about it. I’m just doing things. I just really like making things. I’ve been really fortunate. … It’s nice to hear that when people look at it in its totality, it means that it’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s really lovely because I don’t think of it in that way. I’m really not legacy focused. I try to mostly make things that are good.”
And he does just that.
In addition to making a splash playing Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s phenom “Hamilton,” he’s been on the sitcom “black-ish,” and the movie “Wonder”; appeared opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in Netflix’s “Velvet Buzzsaw”; starred in the series “Snowpiercer” (spun off the 2013 film); played Sebastian the Crab in the live-action adaptation of “The Little Mermaid”; co-starred in the groundbreaking adaptation of “The Nickel Boys”; and played a conflicted Florida rabbi and later lawyer Matthew Tucker (he even gets a chance to sing) in two episodes of Apple TV+s climate-change-focused series “Extrapolations.” There’s more, of course, including a cute song (and video) “Puppy for Hanukkah.”
In addition to all that, he serves as executive producer on numerous projects, including the six-part PBS docuseries “The Class,” which shadowed college advisor Mr. Cam and East Bay students at Antioch’s Deer Valley High School campus during the 2020-2021 COVID-era school year.
He’s integral on the Bay List, a homegrown project spearheaded by his frequent collaborator and friend Rafael Casal. It unites Bay Area filmmakers and creative types — ranging from Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (“Freaky Tales”) to Boots Riley (“I’m a Virgo”) — on an initiative to choose, encourage and nurture 10 screenplays and pilots from writers with Bay Area ties. The response has been terrific with over 1,000 submissions received, he said. (Diggs also has returned to Berkeley High School to speak to students and revisited his collegiate alma mater Brown University in January.)
For people in the Bay, it was Diggs and Casal’s kinetic 2018 comedy-drama breakout hit “Blindspotting,” which he wrote, produced and starred in, that further cemented the pair’s rep as an East Bay creative force.
Ten years in the making, the East Bay buddy film was the first screenwriting project that he and Berkeley High School alum, rapper and actor Casal tackled and it knocked out Sundance Film Festival audiences. (“It was crazy, man,” he recalls about the Sundance experience.) It also blossomed into a one-of-a-kind series on Starz that sadly got canceled after two seasons. It’s a series he’s particularly proud of and wishes more people could get a chance to watch. (Diggs said they’ve been negotiating with Starz in hopes it can reach a wider audience.)
Both the film and the series addressed a slew of hot-button topics such as gentrification, racism, police brutality, life on the inside and the outside, and friendship and did so with vigor and smarts as well as dashes of humor, an essential ingredient that Diggs loves to put in the mix.
“I really like things that are funny,” he said, adding he grew up watching Abbott and Costello and Charlie Chaplin films. “I think they are one of the hardest things to create.”
It was his mother who ensured Diggs had “the option of religion.” He describes his Judaism as “pretty Berkeley” but says key aspects of that faith have “had a lifelong effect on me.”
“The emphasis on questioning things, the desire for coaching argument and being unafraid of dissent is woven into my experience with the religion,” he said. “Being in conversation with the text and not seeing it as static.” He also sees that text mirroring why he loves classic stage plays and how the text in those works can resonate and tap into the times in which we currently live.
His teen years growing up in the Bay (“the place has always been rich in culture, rich in art”) allowed him ample opportunities for creative pursuits as well as athletic ones (he started running at age 9). He was surrounded by young talent who would go on to big projects.
“I remember I was 16 when I made my first rap album with Jake Schreier, actually also at Berkeley High, who just directed ‘Thunderbolts*,’ he said. They recorded that album at Schreier’s mom’s house in a downstairs closet.
It was a bit of a whirlwind back then.
“Those days were like 5 in the morning I’m unloading trucks at Pier 1 Imports and then I would leave at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, go to track practice out at the college in Alameda and run really hard. We used to train so crazy back then. I barely could see straight at that point and then (I’d) get into my mom’s car and drive to Jake’s house and be there until 4 in the morning and nap on his couch for an hour and go back to Pier 1.”
Flash forward to today when Diggs says his foremost priority is fatherhood, and that’s involved a “steep learning curve” on how to fit in creative projects that he and his longtime partner are involved in. But it’s getting smoother thanks to his managers and agents, and learning to compromise.
“It’s made me more efficient with my time,” he adds. “ It’s made me better at prioritizing.”
While Diggs continues to alternate between high-profile endeavors such as his upcoming stint on the fifth and final season of Amazon Prime’s “The Boys,” he finds working on indie films such as “Magic Hour” opposite Katie Aselton, who also directed and co-wrote the heartfelt film, to be enriching when the cameras are on and off.
“There were maybe 15 people total out in the desert (it was shot in Joshua Tree National Park),” he said. “That crew and cast for just 11 days making something that I find really powerful and really beautiful. … It’s the way I love making art.”
Smaller films like that can face an uphill battle and it can be “really hard to get eyes on things like that.” Given the current movie climate, Diggs could see “Blindspotting” maybe encountering a rough time today landing a theatrical release.
“We need to start training ourselves to seek out things like that better,” he said. “Because they’re out there. There is so much good stuff being made that we don’t get, that doesn’t come to us. That’s so frustrating to me.”
In accepting the Freedom of Expression honor, Diggs notes frustration over how on social media, “We get fed things that we’re prone to agree with and (how) we’re also taught to yell really loudly at things we don’t agree with … and what we are not encouraged to do at all is is do any research.”
“In fact, we’re entering a time where we don’t know what research is real or not,” he adds. “It feels like now, despite having all the world’s information at our fingertips, it feels harder to do research than it did when I had to go to the library as a kid.”
That makes it more challenging for a younger generation to speak their truth and to have it not be greeted with a “ton of vitriol in your community, which for a lot of (younger) people, is online.”
Diggs said he feels very fortunate and privileged to be already an established artist who feels “very comfortable expressing myself. I’m not afraid of it and I’m not afraid of what I might get back in return because I’ve also taught myself how to really stand behind my art and I’ve also taught myself to just sit down and shut up and (that) you don’t need to respond to things that happen online, that place isn’t real to me.”