A night at the MFA with Daveed Diggs
The Hamilton musical star talks about storytelling and acting
Daveed Diggs
“Storytelling Across Stage and Screen”
The Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Lectures
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA)
Oct. 9, 2025
On Thursday, Oct. 9, actor, producer, and musician Daveed Diggs opened the 2025–2026 season of the Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Lectures at the Museum of Fine Arts in an evening framed around celebrating community, art and creativity. Best known for his dual roles of Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette in the musical Hamilton, Diggs entered the packed auditorium to roaring applause from a crowd of all ages and backgrounds, ranging from theatre fans to rap enthusiasts.
In conversation with Catherine T. Morris, Director of Arts and Creativity at The Boston Foundation, Diggs discussed his storied career, which includes acting in Soul and the live-action Little Mermaid as well as writing, producing and starring in Blindspotting and singing in the experimental hip-hop group clipping., among many others.
During his speech, Diggs came back to a central question: How do we choose which stories to tell? For him, the answer was clear: the people we tell them for, and with.
Artistic origins
Diggs began the conversation by reflecting on how his upbringing influenced his approach to creating art. Born in Oakland, California, Diggs described his hometown as a place saturated with art, but noted the lack of an industry to establish a creative career. “There was just music everywhere,” he said, adding that his mother was a DJ in the ’70s and ’80s before becoming a social worker. Working day jobs to support themselves, the artists that Diggs knew growing up created “from a space of relative freedom,” making art that spoke solely for themselves and their communities. “I grew up around a lot of artists who’ve made really challenging work, and were unafraid to do it,” he recounted.
Performing came naturally to Diggs. When he was nine years old, he recalled a teacher asking his class to memorize a poem; even as a kid, he decided to act it out. “I wanted to make people laugh,” Diggs said. “And they did. They laughed when I wanted to. I was a very shy kid and that was the most powerful I’d ever felt in my life. And that’s literally the reason I still do this.”
Another formative experience in Diggs’s childhood was when he first saw Marc Bamuthi Joseph perform a piece about the history of tap dancing and its connections to the slave trade at his school. The combination of poetry and dance left a deep impression on Diggs. Years later, he saw Joseph perform the same piece again as part of the play Word Becomes Flesh, and would go on to work for Bamuthi at Youth Speaks. Diggs was later cast in the tenth anniversary performance of Word Becomes Flesh, and got to recite “that poem,” which he described as a crazy and wild experience.
Creativity through collaboration
Those core memories led to a deeper exploration of art and performance. After watching the 1998 documentary SlamNation, Diggs and his friends created their own slam poetry competition. “I sort of fancied myself a slam poet,” he joked. When acting piqued the group’s interest, they put on a play. At 14, one of his friends started making beats and asked Diggs to rap on them; that’s how his first band, Metaphor Play, was born.
During his artistic journey, Diggs was also inspired by singer, songwriter, and producer George Edward Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic collective. “Are there other P-Funk fans here?” he asked, eliciting cheers from the audience. In Diggs’s view, these musicians were able to come together and make musically complex pieces that were also incredibly “smart, fun and silly,” a balance often difficult to achieve.
In a similarly collaborative style, many of Diggs’s most meaningful projects have been those he’s pursued with his close friends. “My favorite things I’ve ever made and, if I’m [being] honest, the most fruitful ones, [...] have always been with people I was already friends with,” he said. Take one of his clipping. bandmates, William Hutson, whom Diggs met when he was nine, for example. Similarly, Diggs had already been friends with Lin-Manuel Miranda for over a decade before he was asked to take part in Hamilton. Diggs has also known Rafael Casal, his Blindspotting co-creator, for a long time. They met through a mutual high school friend who set up a “rapper play date” for the two of them when Diggs had just returned from college. “We rapped until four in the morning,” Diggs said. He’s spoken with Casal every day since.
Project themes
When selecting a project, Diggs focuses more on the “who,” rather than the “what.” From Diggs’ point of view, the work itself is outside of his control, and he has been both “pleasantly surprised” as well as “totally mortified” at seeing a finished product. What he can control, however, is the environment around him — choosing people to collaborate with that share the same interests and understand the stories that move him.
Even with that clarity, Diggs admits that explaining why he chooses to work on some projects over others isn’t easy. “If the words are good, I probably want to do it,” he said. As a producer, Diggs sometimes struggles with finding where he can add value, which wasn’t the case before. Diggs remembered when he had “a lot of Hamilton fairy dust” after rising to fame; he felt like he had the power to make projects happen and help stories get off the ground. Nowadays, though, he is more cautious when selecting projects because his creative process often slows others down. “I like to take my time with things, and this isn’t a world that’s particularly geared for that,” Diggs explained. “I live in the process part.”
Many of his projects are linked by a common thread of social justice. Topics such as race, Blackness, and the history of the United States are common in his work. He also gravitates towards stories that push the envelope. One of these works is the play White Noise, in which Diggs portrayed a Black artist who asks his white friend to make him his slave for 40 days. He described the project as “one of the most challenging things” he’s ever worked on.
Similarly, Diggs reflected on playing Frederick Douglass in The Good Lord Bird. He was deeply interested in the project, saying that “it seemed impossible” it would be made. The same feeling made him want to be involved with Hamilton. Director Thomas Khail pitched the idea as a rap musical about the life story of Alexander Hamilton; Diggs joked that he first thought it was “a terrible idea,” which made him immediately say yes.
Regarding his musical career, Diggs has done his fair share of experimentation, particularly with clipping. The group’s most recent album, Dead Channel Sky, was written to resemble a compilation CD found in a cyberpunk world. To create the album, Diggs dug into fiction from the ’80s and ’90s, discovering that the future these books imagined is not dissimilar to the world today, which he referred to as the “apocalypse we currently live in.”
Words of advice
Throughout the conversation, the audience listened attentively, responding with good-natured curiosity about his life during the Q&A section. Besides the jokes and laughs, though, Diggs conveyed a deep wisdom about the artistic process. For Diggs, creating is a powerful thing to do. At several points in the talk, he highlighted how “making things is hard,” whether they are good or bad.
When an audience member asked him to give advice to young artists, Diggs told them to focus on creating. “Writers write,” he said. “Artists make art.” He also stressed the importance of pursuing a passion in spite of challenges and of taking initiative rather than waiting for permission. For aspiring actors and musicians, he recommended acting on inspiration immediately with friends alongside them. “Inspiration is a really fleeting thing,” Diggs said.