Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal Talk 'Blindspotting'

Six years before Daveed Diggs made Thomas Jefferson cooler than any history teacher thought possible in the musical Hamilton, he was huddled over a pirated version of the screenwriting software Final Draft with his best friend, Rafael Casal. A producer had offered Casal a movie after seeing his slam poetry on YouTube and HBO’s Def Poetry. Casal brought Diggs on board, and right away they knew what the subject had to be: their city, Oakland, California.

In 2009, that topic was weighted with tragedy. “Oscar Grant was murdered at Fruitvale Station, blocks away from where I was living,” says Diggs, referring to the unarmed black man shot by a white police officer on January. At that point, says Diggs, “you couldn’t write about Oakland without talking about that.”