Daveed Daniele Diggs (born January 24, 1982) is an American actor, rapper, and singer-songwriter. He is the vocalist of the experimental hip hop group Clipping, and in 2015, he originated the dual roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton, for which he won a 2016 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical. Along with the main cast of Hamilton, he was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in the same year.Diggs was born in Oakland, California, the son of Barbara, a social worker, and Dountes Diggs, a bus driver. His mother is Jewish, and his father is African-American. His parents named him “Daveed”, the Hebrew pronunciation of David. Diggs has said, “‘David’ means beloved in Hebrew… They spelled it with two Es because my dad liked the look of it.” His parents’ ethnic and racial identities have contributed to his own self-identification: “The cultures never seemed separate—I had a lot of mixed friends. When I was young, I identified with being Jewish, but I embraced my dad’s side too.”
