Lin-Manuel Miranda is an actor, a writer, a singer, a rhymer. A masterful Tweet-sender and equality defender. A playwright who can do no wrong. You might see him as a master of theater, but we call him an unparalleled “creator.”
Where it started:
Everyone starts somewhere. For Miranda, that place was the 8th grade, when he first began writing one-act plays as part of an in-school club. By the 10th grade, Miranda’s love for writing plays evolved into an appreciation for penning musicals. “I feel really lucky that I was exposed to opportunities in school that wouldn’t have necessarily have been the case in another school,” he said.
The Driving Force:
Much like Alexander Hamilton, Miranda has always been as scrappy and hungry as they come. But his art, he said, doesn’t feed a hunger for glory or praise. It satiates his appetite for knowledge. “What I try to do is drive myself towards things I’m going to learn from,” he said. He points to his work on the Rob Marshall-directed “Mary Poppins Returns” as an example. “Rob Marshall is the best at directing movie musicals. ‘Chicago’ is one of the great movie-musicals of all time. I’m learning 50 new things just from watching him work,” he said. “Will that movie be a hit? I don’t know. I don’t control that part of it, but I know I get to be in the room with Rob Marshall while he’s making a movie. That’s invaluable.”