‘It was shameful I didn’t know about it’: Hamilton’s Giles Terera on the Zong slave-ship massacre

The Olivier-winning actor is starring in his own play about a horrifying chapter of history and the fight to abolish slavery. He reflects on the resistance to making the story heard

At a pivotal point in his career, Giles Terera realised that the parts being offered to him as an actor of colour were not necessarily the ones he was interested in playing. “They went up to a certain level but I had other stories I wanted to tell, other lives I wanted to investigate,” he says.

So he began combining his acting roles – most famously as Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which earned him an Olivier award – with making music, films and writing. “I remember, in Hamilton, talking to Lin about that and he had the same thing: If the stories you want to tell aren’t being told, tell them yourself.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/PFKvZhT