Since “Hamilton,” Diggs has racked up first-rate TV roles, including “Snowpiercer,” “Black-ish,” “Central Park,” “The Get Down” and “The Good Lord Bird.” But, lately, he’s been making movies, a transition he’s embraced. Instead, he says, “That was the last time I got to perform music until this year when my band went back out on tour.” “My partner was like, ‘You have to get on a plane, they’re going to close the borders.’” Like most people at the time, he figured it’d just be a couple of weeks and then right back to work.
“That was the last thing I had to do,” he recalls. There was a bit of added pressure too, since Diggs finished recording the track on March 20, 2020, with the COVID-19 lockdown looming. “She just happened to be in the room when we were recording, and was like, ‘Get in there and riff.’ I said, ‘C’mon man, really? Can I have a moment?’ But it’s my favorite part of the song.”
“You’re not competing with that voice,” Diggs says, chuckling. As for recording the track with Halle Bailey - Ariel provides background vocals in the updated arrangement - Diggs has one word: “Unfair.” “If I ever did anything that deviated from the original, Alan and Rob would smile” - his cue to keep going. “I was super nervous about it,” Diggs admits, but in rehearsals, Marshall and Menken encouraged him to make it his own. “Under the Sea,” however, was particularly daunting given that Diggs isn’t a trained vocalist. “The rap battle at the end is just icing on the cake, like candy. “Her performance is insane - to be doing what she’s doing in that voice and all those characterizations,” he adds. But it’s just like anything else.” He gives the lion’s share of the praise to Awkwafina, saying she did all the heavy lifting. “Rap music, for people who don’t make rap music, feels like a magic trick. “His speech patterns are so familiar to me,” Diggs explains. Given their familiarity, pulling that track together was easy, with Miranda delivering the gist of Diggs’ bars over Facetime from an airport. Sure, Ariel - the titular mermaid - is the star, but Sebastian steals the show with two major numbers, “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl.” Plus, for the live-action version, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda (Diggs’ “Hamilton” co-star and creator) penned a new track, “The Scuttlebutt,” which features Scuttle (Awkwafina) and Sebastian in a speed-rap cadence as its grand finale. Key to the character’s personality is his musical ability. Sebastian in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” Walt Disney Studios “It was this process of trying things out with the various coaches to get a thing that feels consistent with who this crab is.” “Vocally, what we ended up on is a nod to the Sebastian that everybody knows and loves but also is what my voice is capable of doing, both singing and speaking,” Diggs says. But the voice has a Trinidadian tinge, influenced by the late playwright Tony Hall, a native of the island, who schooled Diggs on calypso history before he died in 2020. In a tribute to Wright’s performance, his crustacean is from the Caribbean too. He says he was detailed and deliberate when developing the accent for Sebastian. For the occasion he’s wearing a deep-red suit with a seabed pattern and a fishbone brooch affixed to his jacket. Once he overcame his anxieties, Diggs dove into creating the character - as he does for our Zoom conversation hours before the film’s U.K. “I don’t know if this is gonna work like that for kids - we’ll see.” “That performance is a thing that sits with me,” Diggs says in wonder at the prospect of a shared legacy with the actor who voiced the role in the 1989 animated classic. That’s because whenever he imagined Sebastian, Diggs would hear stage and screen star Samuel E. “It took a long time to register,” Diggs admits. After workshopping a couple scenes and songs with Marshall and producer John DeLuca, he still didn’t think he’d get the part. When his reps called to say director Rob Marshall wanted him to audition, Diggs tried to pass, believing the filmmakers were just asking to be nice. But Diggs’ insecurities - much like Sebastian’s persistent worries - nearly got the best of him.
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