VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Daveed Diggs & Rafael Casal Reveal Their Favorite ‘Blindspotting’ Scenes

Based on the movie of the same name, the Starz series Blindspotting continues the story of Miles (Rafael Casal) and how his sudden incarceration affects his partner, Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and their son in its new second season.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview, creators and producers Daveed Diggs and Casal discussed what turning their movie into a television show was like.

“For us, the great thing about television is because it’s like shorter form over a longer period, there’s a lot more of an opportunity for these kind of like individual focal points and for us to have these moments to sort of pepper dance throughout the show and talk about how movement expresses the things that you can articulate through language or the way that heightened language will help us compress and use metaphor to articulate a feeling in a way that would otherwise take an essay or a novel to capture,” Casal said. “Then the movie really focused on police violence, especially on black and brown people and on black and brown neighborhoods, and so another chapter of that kind of violence is the prison industrial complex and so I think the show is really about how does this affect communities that are predominantly communities of color that are economically strained communities and the way that impacts children and mothers and wives and the extended family of somebody that goes to prison.

“Some of that is dealing with the repercussions of Collin’s incarceration in the movie, some of it is dealing with the immediate repercussions of Miles being put in prison and the impact that it has on his son and on his partner, who becomes his wife in the first season,” Casal continued. “So I think the hope was to be able to tell that small story well and clean enough where we could make it super f—ing funny so that people would want to watch it and then periodically gut punch everyone to remind them that this is not a fantasy but this is this is the reality of millions of Americans. There’s two million people, over two million people in this system, there’s five million people affected by the whole prison industrial complex the amount of families is unquantifiable it’s so many people that have to engage with this system in some way and so I think to make a place where we kind of laugh about it but also grounded a little bit more make it real for people with the goal of the show.”

Diggs went on to reveal his favorite scene from the second season.

“There’s a totally silent moment in episode three that I’m pretty in love with. Ashley and Teena (Katlynn Simone Smith), a new character, standing outside during the family visitation,” Diggs said. “I think it’s pretty great. Also, all of episode seven is a really deep-cut inside joke for essentially just my family and friends, yeah that tradition, that meat fest is a real thing but you would only know if you had ever been to one.”

Season two of Blindspotting is now available on Starz.