Emma Watson Interviews Lin-Manuel Miranda for UN Women HeForShe Arts Week

Emma Watson, the UN Global Goodwill Ambassador, has taken to Facebook to share a four-part interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator, star and writer of the Broadway hit musical Hamilton. This interview was taped during the HeForShe Arts Week in New York City. The HeForShe Arts Week, an initiative to leverage the arts for gender equality, was a part of UN’s International Women’s Day commemoration. To celebrate the Arts Week, HeForShe and its partner institutions gathered in New York City to spotlight the efforts taken towards gender equality and women’s rights.

Lin-Manuel Miranda shares his inspiration to Hamilton, mentioning Ron Chernow’s extensive biography on the first US Secretary of the Treasure as his inspiration for telling the “proto-American immigrant story” via a musical that mixes styles from hip hop and R&B to “Beatlesque” music. Hamilton has been a massive Broadway success, and Emma Watson herself praises Lin-Manuel Miranda for creating a piece of art that left a huge impression on her by blasting through every expectation and tradition.

Miranda states that when creating the structure for the musical, he stole a little from Harry Potter and elaborates this statement by saying that like Harry, who meets Malfoy before meeting the people who become his real friends, Hamilton first meets Aaron Burr and only after that his real friends, namely Hercules Mulligan and Marquis de Lafayette. In addition to discussing the inspiration for Hamilton, Watson and Miranda discuss the contemporary issues the musical is able to tackle despite its historical context, like the role of government and the extend US should be involved in the issues of other countries. In addition, Miranda brings up the fact that in Hamilton, every character who dies does so as a result of gun violence, a controversial and contested issue in contemporary United States.

Watson praises Miranda for writing strong women who in Hamilton take form of the Schuyler sisters. Though the Schuyler sisters were a part of Hamilton’s life, historical accounts of them are much more limited than those focusing on Hamilton and the men he worked and socialized with. This lack of historical records means that Miranda had to do intensive research in addition to creating stories for these women in order to make them a crucial part of the narrative of the play. Watson asks Miranda about the female storytellers that have inspired him, to which Miranda responds by naming Jeanine Tesori (the composer of broadway musical Fun Home), Elizabeth Shadows (the composer of Broadway musical Runaways), Judy Blume, J.K. Rowling and several other female writers and creators. Towards the end of the fourth part of the interview, Watson and Miranda sort the Hamilton characters into Hogwarts houses, with Hamilton himself as Gryffindor.

Throughout the interview, Watson and Miranda cover a wide range of issues with intelligence, passion and enthusiasm. Also, Emma Watson beatboxes while Lin-Manuel Miranda freestyles about gender equality, which is definitely worth seeing and hearing! You can watch the four part interview from Emma Watson’s Facebook page and below: