It was Sunday afternoon, and DeBose, 30, was in bed at her home on the Upper East Side, propped up on pillows, her rescue cats, Isadora Duncan and Frederick Douglass, occasionally parading through the Zoom call.
In a video interview, they spoke about identity, fighting stereotypes and getting notes from Stephen Sondheim, the original lyricist.
Toward the end, he asked if there was anything else he needed to know, and I was like, if you’re not interested in exploring the Afro-Latin identity, and finding ways to incorporate it or talk about that, you probably shouldn’t hire me.
Steven, when we were filming, was like, does this actually feel authentic to you? And if not, we should change it.
I tried very, very hard to help put her at ease and to be as fair as I could with respect to any envy I might have felt — and by the way, I did.
I actually, in my own naïveté, hadn’t clocked that I was going to be in the same room with her.
Not knowing her well at the time, I didn’t realize that she could only be her own Anita.
I was sitting next to my daughter, and she said, “Mom, why are you crying? This is so joyous.” I said, because Steven got it right.
So either Jeanine or SS2 would come in, and we would chat, and then we’d go again, and we’d continue going until SS1 was happy.
It was just finding the right thing because this vocal can go in a lot of different directions.
The scene when Anita goes to Valentina’s shop and is attacked by the Jets is one of the most emotional in the film.
We’d been working together for so long at that point — there was real love amongst us, and they were all very afraid of hurting me.
DeBOSE I think because it’s a musical, people don’t realize, sometimes, the depth of the material.
MORENO For me, it was a revelation because I realized midway through the film, that I actually found my role model at the age of something like 28, and it was Anita.
That is the one moment in the piece, whether it’s onstage or film — I don’t know if that’s actually what would happen in the world.