♪ The Virginians emerge
with the nation's capitol ♪
♪ And here's the piece de resistance ♪
♪ No one else was in the
room where it happened ♪
♪ The room where it happened ♪
♪ The room where it happened ♪
♪ No one else was in the
room where it happened ♪
♪ The room where it happened ♪
♪ The room where it happened ♪
♪ No one really knows
how the game is played ♪
♪ The art of the trade ♪
♪ How the sausage gets made ♪
♪ We just assume that it happens ♪
♪ But no one else is in
the room where it happens ♪
- Hey, what's up, y'all?
I'm hanging out with Lin Manuel Miranda,
his female co-stars from Hamilton,
as well as our virtual audience.
You can see the film version of Hamilton
starting tomorrow, July
3rd on Disney Plus.
It is time to meet the other
men of Hamilton, y'all.
Let's say hello to Leslie Odom Jr,
Daveed Diggs, Christopher Jackson,
and Okieriete Onaodowan, AKA Oak,
which is what I'm gonna be sticking with.
What's up, fellas? How y'all doing?
- Good, how are you?
- What's up?
- I'm so good, I'm
having to switch screens.
I've never had this many
people on a zoom call.
This is a first for me,
so hopefully we don't fail, here we go.
So now that I have you all here,
have any of you seen the movie yet?
And for those of you who
have, what did you think?
'Cause it's weird to watch yourself.
You're not like just onstage doing it.
- It's pretty good.
- Pretty good (maniacal laughter)
Okay, Chris is officially my favorite.
It was great.
- No, Kelly, Lin's on the
call so I'm not gonna gush.
- You don't wanna make him feel good.
- Somebody has to serve as an anchor,
sort of like concrete shoes,
so that's what I do for him.
That's how I serve our friendship.
- Hey, and welcome back,
Leslie, to the show.
Nice to see you again.
- Good to see you too, Kelly.
- Yes, yes!
We are still ta- my band and I
still talk about your performance.
You are such a great vibe, man.
I dig you so much.
But I was actually gonna
ask you, Leslie, and Daveed,
you both had unique ways
of becoming involved
with this production.
What were they?
I'll start with you, Leslie, go ahead.
- I actually saw Daveed.
I saw the very first reading
of the Hamilton Mixtape.
Lin knows this, up in Poughkeepsie,
my wife was up there
working in Poughkeepsie
and I sent Lin a tweet.
Like hey, I'd love to see,
I hear you guys are doing the act one,
I'd love to see this thing,
and there were no tickets
even then before it was even Hamilton,
there were no tickets to see this thing.
But I had made friends with the ushers
and so I scored the
very last folding chair
in the very last row and
saw a reading of this thing.
I never in a million years thought,
sitting on that last row, that
I'd be in the show, I didn't.
But I do remember, when I heard
Wait For It the first time,
the thought that crossed my mind was well,
whomever gets to sing that song
eight shows a week is gonna
be a very lucky actor.
And I was right!
- I was right! (maniacal laughter)
- I was very, very right.
- That's so awesome!
Well, Daveed, how about you?
- I, well, Lin and Chris Jackson
and myself and Tommy Kail,
are all in a band together
called Freestyle Love Supreme.
And we were doing a show in
New Orleans at the Superbowl.
We were freestyling about
sports celebrities on ESPN.
And Tommy came up to me and was like,
"Lin is writing this rap musical
about Alexander Hamilton."
I said, "that's a terrible idea."
And Tommy said, "Do you want to come
"do this reading up at Vassar?"
And I said, "Are you gonna pay me?"
And he said yes and so I said yes.
(Kelly laughs)
And then I got up.
And then Lin sent me his demos
and I was, I all of a sudden realized,
oh wait, this is something very special.
Even with Lin doing
every voice in the show-
- Which I don't recommend.
I don't recommend that as
a way of experiencing this.
Only these guys had to do it.
- The songwriting was
already, even way back then,
I remember listening to
those and being like,
wow, damn, like my friend who
I already thought was amazing
is actually, this is very very good.
I didn't know if it would be popular.
I still thought it was a bad idea,
but it was very well done.
- Oh my god, I love this cast!
Okay, let's hit up our virtual audience
for a quick question.
What's up, Emily? Do you have a question?
- Yeah, I think, thank you all so much
for letting us sit on this.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- But if you could each
talk a little bit about,
what it was like filming this
since a lot of you were
mostly stage actors
up until that point.
What was the experience like
having a camera in your face
while you were doing this live show?
- For me, I think we all kind
of had a varied experience
and were just really interested
in just doing our regular show.
It's really daunting to think
that what you've done for so long,
so many, you know, so many shows a week.
You know, there's gonna
be this one performance.
And so, you kind of want
it to be as you know,
in your regular moment as possible.
And the good thing about Hamilton
is that we had so many
crazy things happening
on the outside of us, that
we learned to kind of stay
within each other's eyes to be grounded.
We you know, we went
through a lot of excitement
and that's the way we stayed in our show
I think is kind of clinging to each other.
- Yeah, I always sort of say,
we're the best rehearsed
movie cast of all time.
Like we were just rounding
on a year doing the show
on Broadway when we filmed it.
So it really is about, it was just
honoring what we'd been doing.
And not worrying about
like if the camera's here
or if the camera's there.
Like, we're doing our show.
This is not the kind of
movie where it's like,
well, if we lose that scene,
he's not gonna find it
in the editing room.
It was about the best way of capturing
what we had already been doing.
