UP RISE

The last time TF sat down with Lin-Manuel Miranda – ahead of the 2018 release of Mary Poppins Returns – he professed to be sleep deprived on account of his then three-and-a-half-year-old and four-month-old children keeping him awake at all hours. Not that we were able to tell. Hanging with Miranda is like mainlining sunshine intravenously, such is his infectiously upbeat aura. So, when we catch up again in August 2021, the obvious place to start our chat is by asking if he’s getting any more kip these days. “I wish I could say that I’m very well rested,” he laughs. “But now the issue is that they’re mobile. They both charged into the room to sleep in our bed at around three in the morning, and I said, ‘I give up,’ and went to their bed to sleep. So I had a fitful night in a small bed!”

While that lifestyle doesn’t seem to befit a Midas-fingered super-talent in possession of a Pulitzer Prize, Olivier Awards, a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ and three-quarters of an EGOT, it’s par for the “It’s very weird, I’m seeing the Magisterium artwork all around me,” he says from a production office.