RISE UP

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA CONQUERED THE WORLD WITH MUSICAL PHENOMENON HAMILTON, AND NOW HE’S STEPPING UP TO ADD MOVIE DIRECTOR TO HIS LIST OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS. TOTAL FILM MEETS THE MULTI-AWARD-WINNING MULTI-HYPHENATE TO FIND OUT WHY HE STILL RELATES TO THE STORY OF A STRUGGLING SONGWRITER IN HIS SURPRISINGLY PERSONAL ADAPTATION OF STAGE SHOW TICK, TICK…BOOM!

- MATT MAYTUM

The last time TF sat down with Lin-Manuel Miranda – ahead of the 2018 release of Mary Poppins Returns – he professed to be sleep deprived on account of his then three-and-a-half-year-old and four-month-old children keeping him awake at all hours. Not that we were able to tell. Hanging with Miranda is like mainlining sunshine intravenously, such is his infectiously upbeat aura. So, when we catch up again in August 2021, the obvious place to start our chat is by asking if he’s getting any more kip these days. “I wish I could say that I’m very well-rested,” he laughs. “But now the issue is that they’re mobile. They both charged into the room to sleep in our bed at around three in the morning, and I said, ‘I give up,’ and went to their bed to sleep. So I had a fitful night in a small bed!”

While that lifestyle doesn’t seem to befit a Midas-fingered super-talent in possession of a Pulitzer Prize, Olivier Awards, a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ and three-quarters of an EGOT, it’s par for the course for Miranda, whose ability is only exceeded by his humility. His sunniness is hardly diminished via Zoom, either. Today he’s beaming in from Cardiff, where he’s filming Season 3 of His Dark Materials. “It’s very weird, I’m seeing the Magisterium artwork all around me,” he says from a production office.