Seven or so years ago, I was in San Francisco, in the audience of a play I had come to review called Mirrors in Every Corner, written by Chinaka Hodge. The play was brilliant, and one performer really stood out for me—stood out in that play, and from any actor I’d seen in any other play in years. I wrote the theater to arrange an interview with the actor, Daveed Diggs. This was long before his acclaimed performance as Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, first off and then on Broadway.

What stood out? Diggs’s stage manner felt casual, natural beyond the “naturalness” of a dramatic actor who has absorbed the Method. It was like he wasn’t acting at all, just helping someone, say, paint their house. The role—Watts, the protective older brother of a white girl who’s mysteriously born into a black family—demanded intensity, and his performance had this, and yet it never suggested the strain of craft that one detects in some actors. I was reminded of the title of that Kierkegaard book Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. In his performance one sensed a goodness, a purity of heart; could it be simply that he willed one thing? But what?

We spoke over the phone for forty-five minutes, in 2010, about his love of “table work” (when actors sit at a table and discuss the play); his work as a musician with his experimental hip-hop group, clipping, and his days as a theater major at Brown, where he claimed not to have learned much, especially from other students: “I was a little bit too self-centered to examine the work that other people were doing.”
—Sheila Heti

THE BELIEVER: It’s funny to hear you say that you were self-centered at Brown, because when I saw you onstage, I felt the opposite: a deep casualness in your performance which reads as the self-assurance of someone doing a genuine favor for someone else.

DAVEED DIGGS: It was less like a favor and more like I thought the purpose of the show and the artistic merit of the show were worth more than I could ever give. First of all, Chinaka [Hodge, the playwright], who is one of my best friends, wrote this part for me. She is also, apart from being one of my best friends, one of my favorite artists in existence, so that was very humbling. Then, it was a show about Oakland, which is the place in the world I care about the most. It’s where I was born and raised. So to get to do a theater piece about Oakland, California, was also very humbling.

BLVR:...