Daveed Diggs Thought It Was “Lit” That Only the Back Of His Head Would Be in ‘Nickel Boys:’ “This Is Wild!”

If you’re looking forward to seeing Hamilton star Daveed Diggs in the upcoming film adaptation of Nickel Boys , fair warning: You’ll only ever see the back of his head.

At a press conference following a New York Film Festival screening of the film on Friday, Diggs recalled the first moment that Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross explained his role in the movie, which is based on Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed 2019 novel of the same name.

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“He was like, ‘Look, I don’t want you to feel undervalued, the camera’s going to be on your back. You’re wearing the camera, but it’s behind your head,'” Diggs told the NYFF audience. “I was like, ‘Lit. This is wild! I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’m sure I won’t get to again. Let’s go.'”

Diggs added, with a laugh, “It was a huge selling point for me, but it’s mostly because I did not understand what he was saying at all.”

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What Ross was saying was that the entire film is shot in a first-person point-of-view. For young stars Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, that meant the camera acted as a stand-in for the protagonist of any given scene. For Diggs—who plays the adult version of the protagonist, Elwood—it meant carrying around a camera rigged to his back, which filmed the back of his head. Audiences never see Diggs’s face in the movie.

Diggs told the NYFF audience that he found the responsibility of being a camera operator, in addition to an actor, quite daunting.

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“They put the rig on me pretty early in the day, and were like, ‘You can take it off.’ I was like, ‘ No, I don’t think I can. Can you bring a monitor over here? How does it work?'” Diggs explained. “It felt like too much responsibility. I didn’t want to mess up the visual language of the thing. So I spent all day in that thing, just trying to figure out: How does it look the most natural when it’s behind somebody’s head? What are the ways you can sit that work? It was super technical.”

But ultimately, Diggs concluded, it was worth it. “It was a really incredible experience for me, but it was scary.”

Whitehead’s 2019 novel Nickel Boys , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is based on the true story of Dozier School. This Florida reform school for boys that operated for over 100 years— from 1900 to 2011—was exposed for abusing students, including beatings, rapes, torture, and murder. Whitehead’s novel takes place over two timelines, one in the 1960s, and one in the 2010s, and tells the story of a Nickel student named Elwood (Herisse) and his friend, Turner (Wilson).

Ross, who is best known for his 2018 Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening , co-wrote the Nickel Boys screenplay with Joslyn Barnes. The cast includes Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

The Nickel Boys movie will open in select theaters on October 25, before streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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