The polymath star of Pixar’s Soul, the Guardian’s No 2 film of the year – who also has an album in our top 50 – on his busy 2020, the necessity of representation, and why horror is especially adept at conveying the black experience
In his visor-and-face-mask combo, Daveed Diggs resembles a cross between a welder and a highwayman. He peers into his webcam as he walks, offers a “Yo!”, and finds a quiet corner of a
Los Angeles studio to sit down, then whips off his headgear to reveal spidery braids and a black beard. An East Bay T-shirt serves as a reminder that the 38-year-old hails from Oakland, the Bay Area city that provided the backdrop, and the dazed deadpan sensibility, for Blindspotting. That extraordinary film, released in 2018, which Diggs co-wrote and starred in, twisted straight-arrow subjects (racist
police violence, unconscious bias, gentrification) into comic vignettes without any loss of gravitas.
He is speaking today from the set of the TV spin-off series. “It’s the same idea as the film,” he says. “It’s a
comedy in a world that won’t let it be one.” Praising Blindspotting in these pages two years ago, Mike McCahill described it as “2018: The Movie”, but there seems regrettably little chance that the series will look dated by the time it reaches our screens. “The topic of the different policing of poor and brown people is not new to the current resurgence of Black Lives Matter,” Diggs says. “That’s the world we live in. It’s as consistent as it has always been.”