Daveed Diggs

Sebastian has Daveed Diggs’s voice and a crab’s face, and the combination is less helpful than it sounds. In Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid (2023), the creature cannot supply the expressions that the comedy needs. Diggs researched Sebastian’s Caribbean-inflected speech, but the animation gives that effort little help. We sat through ‘Under the Sea’ without once wanting to sing; the busy reef never compensated for faces that could not perform the jokes. Dion Beebe’s grey-green underwater photography makes it harder still to follow the action.

That is a frustrating use of someone who began in theatre and as vocalist with the experimental hip-hop group clipping. His breakthrough came with the dual roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the stage musical Hamilton (2015). Rapid, technically precise delivery was central to the appeal. Co-writing and starring in Blindspotting (2018) brought his Oakland speech rhythms into film drama, including freestyle rap sequences. The writing can be schematic, but the freestyle passages give his rhythmic delivery something to do within the story.

Television gave him a lead as Andre Layton in Snowpiercer (2020–2024). The family animation has given him less to work with. In Trolls Band Together (2023), his Spruce gets no further than a single character trait, much like Kid Cudi’s Clay. The film puts more care into its textures than into giving these brothers anything to develop. That is a shortage of writing, and we would be wary of treating it as evidence against the actor.

Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (2026), in which he plays Vikktor, offers a better evening than either of those family films. We liked its humour and casting, despite the overcomplicated plotting, though that is a recommendation for the ensemble rather than a claim for Diggs alone. For a clearer sense of what he can do with language, start with Blindspotting and its use of Oakland rhythms and freestyle rap.