Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal spent 9 years making “Blindspotting,” a dark and dreamlike 2018 buddy comedy about two friends grappling with police power in a rapidly gentrifying Oakland.
The story, of Diggs’s Collin, a mover wrapping up his parole, and Casal’s Miles, his volatile best friend, had been told.
They reasoned that there was more to this woman, though — enough, Diggs and Casal had decided by the time the meeting ended, to build a whole series around.
Cephas Jones still remembers the day, three years ago, when Diggs and Casal called to pitch her on it.
Cephas Jones, 31, who recently won an Emmy in the short-form category for the Quibi series #FreeRayshawn, was speaking on a recent weekday afternoon at a coffee shop in South Brooklyn, near where she lives with her fiancé, Anthony Ramos.
She has an elegant forehead, sultry eyes, and a mouth that often relaxes into a frown, contrasting with her natural, mellow warmth.
Cephas Jones grew up a few miles from that coffee shop, in Midwood, Brooklyn, the daughter of Ron Cephas Jones and Kim Lesley, a jazz singer.
She left after two years and picked up again at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, then joined the ensemble of the LAByrinth Theater Company, where her father is a member.
Then came the audition for “Hamilton.” Before its Public Theater run, Kail decided to recast a few parts, including the dual role of Peggy, the youngest Schuyler sister, and Maria Reynolds, Alexander Hamilton’s mistress.
Join Times theater reporter Michael Paulson in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, catch a performance from Shakespeare in the Park and more as we explore signs of hope in a changed city.
It’s a quality she likely absorbed from the actors’ actors, past and present, of the LAByrinth ensemble — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Liza Colón-Zayas, Deirdre O’Connell, Stephen McKinley Henderson — shape-shifters all.
They cast her as Ashley, and once filming of the movie began, Casal marveled at how quickly and completely she built out her character.
In the first moments of the pilot, several police officers drag Miles away on a drugs charge, leaving Ashley to navigate his absence.
That theme resonates personally with Cephas Jones, who has vivid memories of visiting a relative jailed at Rikers Island in New York City.
“Blindspotting” does so, in part, through abstract dance sequences, choreographed by the artists and activists Lil Buck and Jon Boogz, which are meant to suggest the ripple effects of imprisonment.
These direct address segments provide helpful insight, as Cephas Jones imbues the character with her own watchfulness, making Ashley something of a cipher.
A technician, Cephas Jones makes a mess of her scripts, underlining, highlighting, marking out shifts in meaning and feeling.
Her acting is as interior as it is unselfconscious, and she makes Ashley seem like a real woman, with real emotions and real history.
Diggs and Casal discovered they could write just about anything for her and that she would play it, as long as she found it true to character.
While she and Ramos formerly shared much of their romance, including his proposal, online, they have lately become more private, even taking video of that proposal back down.
But her art, like the slinky, slow-jam-filled EP “Blue Bird,” which she recently released, is there for the taking.