Fresh from changing the face of Broadway with his generation-defining musical Hamilton and delivering a boatload of new Disney earworms in Moana, Lin-Manuel Miranda is making a break for the big screen. The musical maestro – who created, wrote, and starred in the hip-hop stage show about America’s founding fathers – is not throwing away his shot, starring alongside Emily Blunt in Disney’s hugely-anticipated Mary Poppins Returns. He plays lamplighter Jack – a role analogous to Dick Van Dyke’s Bert in the 1964 original. And while a big, bold musical is an ideal project for Miranda’s move to movies, it did push him into challenging new areas – namely, upping his dance skills, attending a boot-camp to nail the ambitious choreography.
“That was probably the hardest I’ve ever worked,” Miranda tells Empire in the upcoming January 2019 issue. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed: there’s incredible dancing in Hamilton, but Hamilton doesn’t do a lot of it. I stand and rap while amazing things happen around me. Whereas with [Poppins], I’m a huge fan of ‘Step in Time’, and I wanted to earn that. […] I really worked very hard to even hold a candle to Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in that original film.”
Read more about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s miraculous journey from stage to screen in Empire’s Alita: Battle Angel issue, on newsstands from Thursday 29 November.
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