Daveed Diggs and
Rafael Casal spent nine years making
“
Blindspotting,” a dark and dreamlike 2018 buddy comedy about two friends
grappling with police power in a rapidly gentrifying Oakland, California. They
considered it an artistic success, if not necessarily a financial one. “We
didn’t make any money off it,” Diggs said. “I’m not sure anybody did.”
اضافة اعلان
But shortly after its release, Lionsgate, which had produced
it, approached the filmmakers about adapting “Blindspotting” for television.
They declined. The story, of Diggs’ Collin, a mover wrapping up his parole, and
Casal’s Miles, his volatile best friend, had been told. But Lionsgate insisted
on a meeting, and as the men prepared for it, an idea began to form. Maybe they
had another story to tell: Ashley’s.
In the film, Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones), Miles’
ride-or-die, appears in only a handful of scenes. The movie was shot in 22
days; Cephas Jones was called for just three. Ashley exists only relationally,
as a partner, a mother, a friend. They reasoned that there was more to this
woman, though — enough, Diggs and Casal had decided by the time the meeting
ended, to build a whole series around. The eight episodes of this new
“Blindspotting” began Sunday on Starz.
Cephas Jones still remembers the day, three years ago, when
Diggs and Casal called to pitch her on it. She nearly dropped her phone. “I was
like, yes!,” she recalled. “I was like, 100 percent I will do this. I think I
even screamed.”
Cephas Jones, 31, who recently won an Emmy in the short-form
category for the Quibi series #FreeRayshawn, was speaking on a recent weekday
afternoon at a coffee shop in South Brooklyn, near where she lives with her
fiance, Anthony Ramos. (Ramos is, like Cephas Jones and Diggs, a “Hamilton”
alum.) She appeared on the sun-kissed street corner almost comically dressed
down, in unmatched sweats and 80s throwback glasses, her hair pulled into a
tight bun.
“She has a real vibe,” Thomas Kail, who directed her in
“Hamilton,” told me. “Her mom was cool. Her dad was cool. And she is cool.”
Friends call her Jazz.
Cephas Jones grew up a few kilometers from that coffee shop,
in Midwood, Brooklyn, daughter of Ron Cephas Jones (“This Is Us”) and Kim
Lesley, a jazz singer. She went to LaGuardia High School, the “Fame” school,
and from there to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she hoped to become
a coloratura soprano.
She left after two years (“I went through a weird time,” she
said) and picked up again at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater,
then joined the ensemble of the LAByrinth Theater Company, where her father is
a member. She auditioned and auditioned, supporting herself as a beer garden
waitress.
Then came the audition for “Hamilton.” Before its Public
Theater run, Kail decided to recast a few parts, including the dual role of
Peggy, the youngest Schuyler sister, and Maria Reynolds, Alexander Hamilton’s
mistress. Cephas Jones fumbled her first try at Maria’s song, “Say No to This.”
But the casting director told her to come back a week later. That time, singing
a version of Prince’s “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore,” she killed it.
“If she was nervous, she didn’t show it,” said Lin-Manuel
Miranda, the show’s composer. “She was poised and ready and incredible.” Kail
recalled the velvety nap of her voice, “How surprising and effortless and
natural her sound is.”
Soon they noticed something else, how completely she
transformed from one role to the next. Some spectators — spectators who didn’t
read their Playbills — never even realized that the same actress had played
both parts. It’s a quality she likely absorbed from the actors’ actors, past
and present, of the LAByrinth ensemble — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Liza
Colón-Zayas, Deirdre O’Connell, Stephen McKinley Henderson — shape-shifters
all.
They cast her as Ashley, and once filming of the movie
began, Casal marveled at how quickly and completely she built out her
character. “She created an Ashley that felt truly full in her complexity in
such a short amount of time,” Casal said. “When somebody uncovers that much
about a character in so few scenes, that screams that they need more scenes.”
If this new “Blindspotting” is an ensemble piece, Cephas
Jones’ Ashley stands at its vibrant center. In the first moments of the pilot,
several police officers drag Miles away on a drugs charge, leaving Ashley to
navigate his absence. If the “Blindspotting” movie centered on police violence,
the show explores how incarceration affects entire communities.
That theme resonates personally with Cephas Jones, who has
vivid memories of visiting a relative jailed at Rikers Island in New York City.
“I’m just very familiar with it,” she said. “I understand it. I know it. And it
doesn’t just affect the people inside. It affects families and friends.”
“And it’s trauma,” she added. “The show really wants to shed
light on that.”
In many scenes, Ashley defers to showier characters like
Jaylen Barron’s Trish, Miles’ sister, and Helen Hunt’s Rainey, his mother. With
a young child and an imprisoned partner, Ashley has to keep it together, not
let it all out. So despite her musical theater background, Cephas Jones rarely
goes big and she never pulls focus. But your eyes move toward her anyway. Her
acting is as interior as it is unselfconscious, and she makes Ashley seem like
a real woman, with real emotions and real history.
Diggs and Casal discovered they could write just about
anything for her and that she would play it, as long as she found it true to
character. She never fought to have the most lines or the most jokes or the
most drama. She fought instead for what Ashley would do and could say, and for
the woman Ashley might become. “When she is championing a character, she takes
that very seriously,” Diggs said. “She really rides for them.”
Cephas Jones is trying to ride for herself, too. While she
and Ramos formerly shared much of their romance, including his proposal,
online, they have lately become more private, even taking down video of that
proposal. “Now we just don’t feel like we need to give so much to people
anymore,” she said. “Because you want to save that for yourself.”
But her art, like the slinky, slow-jam-filled EP “Blue
Bird,” which she recently released, is there for the taking. And so is Ashley,
a single mother and working-class woman of color whom Cephas Jones hopes
audiences will embrace as a superhero.
“Mothers out there who go through something like this, they
are the unsung heroes,” she said. “They don’t wear a cape. They don’t have
magical powers. The magical power is keeping your family together.”
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