|
HAMILTON star Daveed Diggs has come a long way from his days as a struggling artist, when he first arrived in New York almost 12 years ago. Long before his Flash-like rhyming as the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the Lin-Manuel Miranda-penned Broadway sensation earned him a Tony Award nod, Diggs was semi-homeless in New York, according to an all-new interview with PEOPLE.
After graduating from Brown University with a degree in theater in 2004, the Oakland-born rapper-thespian, 34, moved to New York. By day, he would go on every audition he could find, and at night, he would couch-surf among his friends' apartments or sleep on the subway. (He preferred the 2 train) In hindsight, living like that was hard, but it didn't feel like that at the time. "I was young and had a lot of friends and was having adventures in New York," Diggs tells PEOPLE. "I was pursuing things I wanted to do." For Diggs, that time was a learning experience that set him on the road to his current successes because he realized he had to actively chase his dreams and stop "waiting for somebody to let me be an artist." "I kept asking to be in this thing, to be in somebody's thing. And you can't do that," he says. "Artists make art, and if nobody is putting you in a thing, you have to make it yourself."Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos
Videos