Image Source: Collider

Daveed Diggs, Andre Layton on Snowpiercer, talked about his latest series where a group of people board a train, trying to find a warm enough place to rehabilitate civilization. He also talked about Blindspoting and his latest project, The Little Mermaid. 

Daveed Diggs shared some of the aspects of Blindspotting with Collider, telling what made him proud to have worked with the TV series. He said, "I think we pulled off a few things I’ve never seen before. When you try something like that, that we didn’t really have a good frame of reference for, you’re not really sure if it’s gonna work. And we had also never made a TV show before, so we didn’t know if it would add up to a TV show either, even if we thought the idea was good."

"Watching it, I was like, “Yeah, this is a TV show. And I’ve never seen things like some of these things.” And then, just on a friendship level, watching Jasmine Cephas Jones put a show on her back and carry it, that was really gratifying for me," He continued. 

He also shared that he is very proud of introducing Benjamin Earl Turner to his audience, whom he has known since the actor was just a young teen at the age of 14. He said that he is "very proud" of his cast in Blindspotting. "I’m proud of how this show was created during the pandemic. People didn’t get sick. That was very gratifying to me. There are a lot of things I’m very, very proud of about that show," he added.

Now that Diggs has already exceeded himself in the first season, it is obvious that the audience has expectations from the team. But Diggs said that "the expectation doesn’t make us nervous." Still, he is not above the universal feeling of panic. 

"The thing that makes me nervous is, now we know how hard some things are, and we know also what things cost, in a way that we didn’t before," he explained. "We have a more clear idea of what is financially possible, but we’re still being overly ambitious."

On the other hand, the second season is yet not in production, and there is so much that the crew can succeed in achieving. The actor said that the team will incorporate even the most extravagant aspects of the script into the shoots, even though they do not yet have the budget for it. The crew is "aware" of how difficult it can be to bring it all into reality but "we’re gonna do it anyway." 

Moving on to Scowpiecer, Diggs revealed that he as an actor had no idea of where Andre Layton would reach by the end of season 3. "We get scripts and, every single time, I’m like, “Really? This is what we’re doing now. All right.” That’s fun, in a lot of ways. It’s freeing. I think there’s a big part of my brain, that’s the writer side of my brain, and having to do that for Snowpiercer would drive me insane."

Even though there is a lot that goes behind the scenes, as an actor, he is free to play only as much as is asked of him. "I get to play a person who is constantly adapting to whatever is thrown at him. I think that is exactly the way I experience the story, so it’s good," he said. 

Being with the character for a long time has made it easy for him to know how the character would act in different circumstances and he at the point is totally at ease in the "body and to speak in that voice, and the cadence, enthusiasm, and everything."

He also divulged a little deeper into his acting background as he shared, "I never knew I would have that experience. I come from the theater world, which generally has a prescribed end date. So, getting to hang out with Layton for this long, I’m not nervous about him anymore."

Another bonus point to having survived this long in a series means that the actors get to form close relationships with the rest of the cast. Diggs told Collider, "This cast is very, very close, and this season, we shot entirely in the midst of this lockdown. In earlier seasons, you would notice when you weren’t doing scenes with somebody for a while because you wouldn’t see them. But none of us were allowed to leave Vancouver, so we saw each other, and we were each other’s support."

"My memories of shooting the season are way more about what was happening off set than what was happening on set. Whoever had to go to work that day was like, “Haha, you’ve gotta go to work,” and the rest of us would keep hanging out because the world was burning," he added.

Apart from Blindspotting and Snowpiercer, Diggs is also working on the Little Mermaid. While it could be exhausting to balance several projects at the same time, Daveed Diggs shared that though he does not experience burnouts from working excessively, he also does not get "restless" when he has free time at hand. '

"If I’m gonna be doing something, I would like it to be challenging," Diggs explained. "That’s the order of preference for me. Top of the list is doing absolutely nothing. And then, next on the list is that I wanna do something hard."

Sharing his ongoing projects at the moment, he said, "I’m doing a lot of producing right now and helping bring some other stories into the world, from artists that we haven’t necessarily heard of yet, who have great things going into production. I feel very lucky to be attached to it all and to have my hands in all of these different, really cool projects."

Daveed Diggs will play Sebastian on The Little Mermaid; Credits: Variety

You can watch Snowpiercer on TNT on Mondays.