- Where I come from, nobody cares about Broadway at all.
So nobody knew who Lin was.
So I couldn't go home and be like,
I'm in a rap group with Lin-Manuel Miranda.
They would have been like, who, who?
Opportunity.
A good position, chance
or prospect as for advancement or success.
(lively music)
I'm Daveed Diggs.
I'm a rapper, I'm a actor, I'm a producer.
I used to be a substitute teacher.
A lot of people know me
from a musical I did called Hamilton.
I won a Tony and a Grammy for that.
When I got into high school,
I started auditioning for the school plays then.
I also started writing rap songs
and I started writing poetry, spoken word stuff.
In college I kind of kept doing more of the same.
I did a lot of plays.
I was sort of writing and recording rap songs
in my dorm room.
We had a horrible rap group while I was there.
If you can imagine a Brown University rap group
with like 12 people, you know what I'm saying?
We were like the real wack Wu-Tang Clan.
I don't know that I ever thought about it
in terms of a career, really.
I think I always just pushed towards the things that I loved
and didn't really worry about it too much.
I figured I would figure it out.
Broadway was an accident entirely.
I never really considered it as an option.
I left college.
I moved back to Oakland
and sort of moved out and got my own place in East Oakland
and was doing a bunch of substitute teaching.
I was also doing a fair amount of developing curriculum,
rap-based curriculum, for middle school-age kids
and high school-age kids.
While I was substitute teaching, I got,
me and my soon-to-be-friend, Anthony Veneziale,
both got called to substitute teach the same class.
Clerical error.
It's not supposed to happen.
This is in Marin City in California.
We had, sort of, team-taught this class.
Over the course of that class,
where it was a fourth grade class or something.
You have to find something to do
with these kids every 15 minutes.
Short attention spans.
We freestyled with them for awhile.
We had this moment where we were like,
oh, we both do this thing, that's funny.
You know, I gave him a ride home and he said,
we both have this weird thing
where we're teaching and acting and rapping.
We should hang out more.
And, over the course of that, maybe, next year,
he introduced me to Lin, who he had gone to college with,
who was doing this show in the Heights on Broadway
that I didn't know anything about.
Through that I started becoming part
of this group Freestyle Love Supreme
and they would sometimes fly me out to New York
to fill in when they didn't have enough people.
And that's how I met Lin and became friends
and, you know, he eventually wrote this part for me.
The things that I care about,
the things that I've always been interested in,
I work at them really hard
and I'm really good at them.
I'm a very good rapper.
(laughs)
But I should be.
If I had spent this many hours rapping
and I wasn't very good at it,
that would be a bad thing, right?
The thing I tell people all the time is
to throw out your timeline for events.
I think I wasted a lot of time when I was young thinking,
alright, well, by the time I'm 21,
this some real rapper stuff, too, right?
By the time I'm 21, I better be on.
I didn't know what on was.
But I needed to be that.
And then 21 came, it didn't happen, so I,
okay, well by the time I'm 25.
And then that was, well, if it doesn't happen
by the time I'm 30, I'm, you know.
And then, now I'm 33
before anybody knew who I was, you know?
As long as you are, sort of working
towards the things that you love
and as long as you are constantly cultivating your skillset,
the opportunities will come, if you're doing good work.
But what that means is that,
when the opportunities come around,
you'll be ready for them
and you won't have to miss out on a moment.
I think the only thing I've ever done intentionally right
in my life is just say yes
to the things that feel really good.