Anthony Ramos is rapping down the phone: “I’m past patiently waiting / I’m passionately smashing every expectation / Every action’s an act of creation … Um … I can’t remember … Sorry. I’ve been out of the show for two and half years.” Much has happened since Ramos last heard those lyrics on the Broadway stage, in the original production of Hamilton. Ramos’s dual role as John Laurens/Philip Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s all-conquering musical has catapulted him into a career that’s so impossibly busy, you can forgive him for losing track a little. Although the words do come back to him moments later: “Oh yeah – I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow / For the first time, I’m thinkin’ past tomorrow.”
Just in the last year, we’ve seen Ramos as Lady Gaga’s best friend in A Star Is Born, as clownish b-boy Mars Blackmon in Spike Lee’s Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It, and most recently as a conflicted witness to a police shooting in indie drama Monsters and Men, which won a prize at Sundance last year, and is released in the UK on 18 January. There’s more to come, including a sort-of reunion with Miranda (more of which later), the next Godzilla instalment, and the crime thriller he’s currently shooting in Massachusetts with Liam Neeson, titled Honest Thief. Drama, comedy, singing, dancing, Hollywood, Broadway – talk about smashing every expectation.
Monsters and Men brings Ramos back to where he started. It is set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn; a stone’s throw from his native Bushwick. His own life could have turned out much like that of his character Manny’s, he says. Of Puerto Rican descent, Ramos grew up in the projects, one of three children, regularly facing eviction and seeing his mother struggle to put food on the table. Manny also lives in the projects with his mother, his pregnant girlfriend and his young daughter. He’s just got a job, but is presented with a dilemma when he films police shooting a black neighbour outside a convenience store on his phone. The moment consciously recalls a real-life incident in nearby Staten Island in 2014, when Eric Garner died after police used a chokehold to subdue him: the struggle was filmed by a friend of Garner’s.
“The world you see in the film – that was pretty much the world I grew up in,” says Ramos. “It was hard, man. It was hard knowing that you walk into a store sometimes and you’re wearing a baseball cap and a hoodie and some baggy jeans, or your skin is a little darker, and the clerk is just staring at you a little bit harder. The cops treat you a little differently.” He has friends in jail, neighbours who died. “Now people in America are starting to feel what people in the hood have felt for years because now you can see it on a video, but we’ve already been seeing this shit for years.”
Ramos’s ticket out of that life came almost accidentally. He casually auditioned for a school play only to find himself cast in a major role. “I was like, ‘Read a script? I don’t even do my homework. What makes you think I’m gonna learn all these lines?’” But his drama teacher persisted. Two years later, after he failed to apply for college, she helped him win a scholarship to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
But opportunities for an aspiring Hispanic actor were so thin on the ground, that he thought about quitting. So, about five years ago, when he found himself auditioning for an in-development musical called Hamilton, performing the character Hamilton’s song My Shot (the one he was rapping down the phone to me) to Miranda and his team, it really was his shot. “I was just pouring it out, bro. I was singing those words as the character, but I was really singing those words as myself, cos I was like, ‘Yo, I’m not throwing away my shot for nothing. I’m about to give you every ounce I got in my body and soul and mind and my spirit.’ That was kind of how it popped off.”
It was the second time Ramos had auditioned in front of Miranda. The first was four years earlier, for a national tour of In the Heights, Miranda’s previous musical, set among the Hispanic community in Washington Heights, Manhattan. He came close but didn’t get the part. Everyone came to see Hamilton, though. Ramos performed in front of the Obamas, and Mike Pence, on the eve Trump’s presidency – the night a fellow cast member made a gracious plea to the vice-president for tolerance. “The most important thing for me about that night, more than the speech, is that Mike Pence saw that story unfold in front of him. He will never be able to unsee it,” says Ramos.
Spike Lee also came along and cast Ramos in She’s Gotta Have It – a series based on his feature debut, with Ramos in the role Lee originally played himself. For A Star Is Born, he had to go the conventional audition route and was one of the final pieces of the puzzle, he says, but was “super-honoured” to be part of it. “That movie was special from the moment we were all on set,” he says. He had a blast, popping champagne on private jets with Lady Gaga (in character, of course), and watching her singing to Bradley Cooper in the parking lot scene: “She was just freestyling, coming up with lyrics on the spot.”
Today, Ramos considers Miranda a mentor. “Lin has taught me a lot. In conversations we’ve had but also just in the way he goes about his business. I was speaking to him one time, I cracked a joke and said: ‘Oh man, I gotta stop talking hood.’ And Lin said, ‘You don’t ever have to change the way you speak; you just have to make sure people understand you.’ And I was like, ‘Damn! Punch to the gut!’” Now it has come full circle. Ramos’s next gig is the movie version of In the Heights. He is playing the lead, Usnavi – the role Miranda himself played in the original stage version.
For the first time, Ramos is thinking past tomorrow, you could say, but not too hard. “I’m being more selective about what I do, but really it’s just, if I love it, I’ma do it. It’s that simple. I could be paid $100 or a million. The goal for me right now is just to do stuff that feeds me, that fuels me to be the best person I can be and put out the best stuff I can put out.”
Monsters and Men is released on 18 January.
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