By Lynn Elber, Television Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Daveed Diggs was sorting through the many TV offers coming his way a few years ago when, as the Tony Award-winning actor puts it, "there was a lot of 'Hamilton' fairy dust attached to me."
One series that caught his interest was TNT's "Snowpiercer," adapted from the 2013 movie of the same name by Oscar-winning "Parasite" filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. Diggs found the concept richly promising: The last people left on a frozen Earth inhabit a perpetually moving, 1,001-car train that serves as microcosm of society and its divisions.
Diggs has taken on varied projects since his Broadway success in "Hamilton," including the 2018 film "Blindspotting," a dark comedy he co-wrote, and Showtime's upcoming "The Good Lord Bird," in which he portrays former slave and activist Frederick Douglass. But "Snowpiercer" hit the sweet spot.
"I'm a sci-fi guy, and it's more in line with the things that I consume, just not really the things that I have been in," Diggs said. He's serious about his love of science fiction, and quickly picks N. K. Jemisin ("The Fifth Season") as his favorite contemporary writer in the genre.
Sci-fi and horror are "really just kind of reflections of what our concerns or fears are for any given generation. If you read them more like that, they become interesting and entertaining," the actor-musician said.
The role he was offered in "Snowpiercer," as the sole surviving homicide detective and a rebel leader for the working-class passengers locked in the train's "Tail," also gave him the chance to be an action hero. But he still hesitated.
"I was trying to be really careful about saying 'yes' to being a lead on a TV show that was going to take up a lot of my time. If it's a successful show, you're going to be there for years," he said. But he decided that although the setting is a constrained space, "I felt like there was enough different story lines and different characters and enough intrigue. … It felt like a challenge."
The drama series, which also stars Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Connelly ("A Beautiful Mind"), debuts 9 p.m. EDT Sunday. It has been renewed for a second season, but filming for that was interrupted by the coronavirus-caused production shutdown.
Diggs found that he enjoyed working out the choreography of fights but came away with mixed feelings during taping, recalling a scene in which he had to attack a stunt performer.
"We had to do it so many times, and there's a real person who is my friend and I'm breaking a bottle over his head repeatedly. It's breakaway glass, but it's not like you don't feel it. Then he has to fall down on the floor and hit his head on it," he said. While Diggs didn't cause any harm, he found delivering a beating took an "interesting toll that I did not foresee."
"I actually much prefer shooting scenes where I get my (butt) kicked," he said.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More