Fast Company

01 Lin-Manuel Miranda

CREATOR AND STAR, HAMILTON
“There are many other timelines that could have been,” says Hamilton writer, composer, and star Miranda of his trajectory. “But this is what happened, and I am aware that there is a giant spotlight on me.”

For making history

If you ever find yourself in a position to sit down with Lin-Manuel Miranda, know this: You never really “sit down” with Lin-Manuel Miranda. He is always in motion, on a mission; standing still really isn’t his thing. When the 36-year-old composer and lyricist was dreaming up the songs for Hamilton, the Broadway phenomenon that he wrote every line of and currently stars in eight times a week, he would often walk for hours through the streets of New York City, willing the words to come. Even now, he insists that the calmest he ever feels is during the 2 hours and 45 minutes of the show, when he gets to bound around onstage as Alexander Hamilton, “yelling and rapping at the top of my lungs. It’s the most relaxing part of my day.” The physical exertion returns him, every night, to himself, offering an unlikely respite from the attention that’s swirled around him since Hamilton became a cultural and financial force. The only way that Miranda stays whole, now that everyone wants to engage with him—Hollywood, the White House, hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, the music industry, Broadway obsessives, big-money investors, American history buffs, prize committees, schoolteachers, the political establishment—is to keep moving.

On a windy night in March, he invites me to hop with him into the backseat of a black SUV to go from the northernmost tip of Manhattan, where he lives, across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. (“This is Chris’s bridge!” he says proudly as we glide over it, a shout-out to his longtime friend Christopher Jackson, who plays America’s first president in Hamilton.) Miranda rarely finds time to sleep, let alone cross state lines on his night off, but tonight, he tells me with a grin, he is headed to the town of Montclair on a matter of family justice: He needs to settle a score among some fourth graders. One of them has been going around telling his classmates that his uncle is the Hamilton in

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Fast Company

Fast Company1 min read
46 uncommon
WHEN ELECTRONIC ARTS NEEDED TO REBR AND ITS $2 BILLION soccer vedio game FIFA after a financial dispute with the global sport's governing body, it tapped the London-based agency Uncommon for the job—perhaps the most daunting marketing challenge of la
Fast Company2 min read
Reimagining The Ways We Work And Meet
When Chief Operating Officer Stephen Tober joined software company Giant Machines in 2018, his first order of business was to move his fast-growing team out of their shared coworking space in midtown Manhattan. The malfunctioning equipment and unstoc
Fast Company1 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
09 Openai
THE COMPANY THAT dented the universe in 2022 continues to leave its mark. OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM), released in March 2023, is considered 10 times more powerful than its predecessor, discerning context and nuance better, as well as d

Related Books & Audiobooks