Despite earning a Tony and a Grammy for his last musical, "In the Heights," endless praise for his current musical, "Hamilton," which is sold out through the end of the year, and a 2015 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship that comes with $625,000 to pursue new projects, Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda won't stop keeping it real.
"If I go and pee, I will have such a more relaxed answer to this question," Miranda confessed to the audience at a New Yorker Festival event Sunday night, dashing off to relieve his bladder before addressing an audience member's question.
Below we present other essential truths the Washington Heights native and star of "Hamilton" revealed about himself over the course of a 90-minute interview at the Directors Guild Theater in Midtown:
1. He thought the call from the MacArthur Foundation was a call from Time Warner Cable, asking him to reconsider his service cancellations.
“I got the phone call about three weeks ago, and I had just switched from Time Warner to Fios the day before, so I see a strange phone number with a strange area code [pop up on my caller ID], and I went, 'Voicemail. It's Time Warner, they want me back.' It comes again, voicemail. Third time, I’m ready for a fight; it's easier than breaking up with a corporation, which I had the satisfaction of doing the day before.
I said, 'Hello?!'
They said, 'Hi, is this Lin-Manuel Miranda?'
And I said, 'Yes! What's this about?' ready to go into, 'It's done, your box freezes every half hour...'
'This is Christina from the MacArthur Foundation, and I'm calling because you're one of our fellows.'
And I said, 'Oh, I thought you were cable!" So I was just very relieved it wasn’t cable.
2. His superpower is rhyming.
"Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life ... That’s a superpower I’ve been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions."
3. The song in Miranda's repertoire that his dog Tobi likes best is probably the one he co-wrote for the opening of the 2013 Tony Awards.
"I think her favorite song I ever wrote is the opening number for the Tony Awards that Neil Patrick Harris did, because that almost got exclusively written on long walks in Inwood Hill Park. Tom Kitt wrote the incredible music, so I had his music as a guide, and I didn't have to spend any time at the piano — I just walked around Inwood Hill Park talking to myself, and she got to be off-leash. So I would go early, when the Parks Department wasn't around."
4. Half of Miranda's incentive to create his first film, "Clayton's Friends," was getting a crush to kiss him.
"I made a movie when I was 15 years old with all my friends. This is when IMDb was a little more lax with its proceedings, so it's listed as one of my projects. I was 15 years old; it's a terrible movie. I wrote 50 percent of it because I wanted to kiss this one girl, and I wrote a kissing scene for it."
5. When creating a new work of art, Miranda's greatest fear is that he won't finish it.
"I'm afraid all the time. To quote 'Rent,' 'I'm a New Yorker, fear is my life.' I'm very aware that I live in a world where Jonathan Larson, [the composer and lyricist] didn't live to see previews of his show ... The biggest clock is always saying you're going to do this big thing and not making it to the finish line."
