New Heights

From Broadway TO television to ONE of the summer’s buzziest movies, actor COREY HAWKINS is on the rise

- Justin Kirkland

IN 2017, ACTOR COREY HAWKINS WAS filming a movie in Toronto when he got a call from the producers of the U. S. Open. The singer they had booked to perform at the start of the men’s singles final had fallen through—would Hawkins like to do it? “I was like, ‘So, you all want me to do what?’ ” he recalls. “They were like, ‘Sing “God Bless America” while the planes fly over.’ I’m like, ‘Okay.’ ” Within twenty-four hours, on September 10, Hawkins was at Arthur Ashe Stadium, in Queens, belting his heart out. He didn’t know it at the time, but among the 23,000 people in the stands sat Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Hawkins’s performance was an informal audition for the film adaptation of the playwright’s breakout musical, In the Heights.

For Hawkins, thirty-two, landing the role of Benny, a taxi dispatcher who dreams of building his own business, was serendipitous. In the Heights was the first musical he saw, soon after he’d moved to New York City to study drama at Juilliard. It’s set in Washington Heights, the predominantly Dominican neighborhood in upper Manhattan, just blocks from the apartment in Harlem he shared with six roommates when he was starting out as an actor.

The show is both a love letter to the people who live there and a sharp critique of the forces, most notably gentrification, that threaten their way of life.