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Lin-Manuel Miranda isn’t a fan of being canceled.
The singer and playwright is no stranger to criticism of his work and recently addressed the whole notion of cancel culture.
The 41-year-old discussed backlash against his own projects in a lengthy profile with The New Yorker. Miranda previously received some hate for his musical film “In The Heights” where he was slammed for lacking Afro-Latinx representation.
He explained to the publication that he understands that critics will have opinions about his movies regardless of his high success.
“Once something has success, you’re not the underdog trying to make it happen anymore,” he said. “You have to graduate past the mindset of, like, It’s a miracle I got something on the stage. Because now that is expected of me. And people go, ‘Yeah, but what about this? And what about this?’ And that’s fair! I do that with art I find lacking.”
“It’s not cancellation. That’s having opinions,” the “Hamilton” star continued. “So I try to take it in that spirit.”
Miranda added that he won’t let the haters influence his creative process, despite his willingness to hear criticism head-on. “The challenge I find myself in is, how do I stay hungry?” the New York City native said.
“How do I still feel like I have something to say and not worry about what is not in the frame? I’m just trying to build the frame in the first place. Certainly, I have learned lessons from the reception of my work, good, bad and indifferent. You try to take all of it, and whatever sticks to your gut is what you bring with you to your next project,” the “Tick, Tick…BOOM” filmmaker said.
“If you get yourself into a place of fear, of ‘What are people going to say about what I write?,’ you’re f–ked,” Miranda stated. “It’s over. And that’s a place I have to really push past now in a different way. At the end of the day, you can’t control how the world receives something.”
He continued, “All you can control is what your intentions were. And, if it closes in a night, those six years don’t feel like wasted time, because you learned from it and you put everything you had into it.”
Miranda apologized earlier this year following the “In The Heights” controversy, saying he was “truly sorry” on Twitter. “I’m seeing the discussion around Afro-Latinx representation in our film this weekend and it is clear that many in our dark-skinned Afro-Latinx community don’t feel sufficiently represented within it, particularly among the leading roles,” he wrote. “I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latinx representation, the work feels extractive of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy.”
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