PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID OGBONNA
Past
Most actors wouldn’t dare dream that their big break would come in a Tony- and Pulitzer-winning cultural phenomenon. But Jasmine Cephas Jones’s first professional musical theater role was Peggy Schuyler, the youngest of the indomitable sister trio at the center of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. The 28-year-old Brooklyn native—the daughter of This Is Us actor Ron Cephas Jones and British jazz singer Kim Lesley—says the show “opened my eyes to what a piece of art can do. Seeing these old women who have never listened to hip hop before loving it, or these little kids getting so excited about American history, was amazing.” After two years of performing eight shows a week, Cephas Jones became one of the last original cast members to leave the production in December 2016. “In order to keep growing as an artist, I had to leave,” she says. “There’s a part of me that I think will stick with the show for however long it runs. It was a beautiful thing for little girls to watch me and see my color and think, ‘I could do this one day.’”
Present
Though Cephas Jones has left the center of the Hamil-verse behind, she remains in the orbit of her castmates with two upcoming film roles. This month, she appears alongside Daveed Diggs (who played Thomas Jefferson onstage) in Blindspotting, a dramedy about gentrification and race relations in Oakland, California, that was one of the buzziest films at Sundance. As the partner of Diggs’s reckless on-screen best friend, Cephas Jones anchors some of the film’s most emotionally wrenching scenes. And she joins another Hamilton alumnus (and her real-life boyfriend), Anthony Ramos, in Monsters and Men, a drama about a police shooting in Brooklyn that’s slated to hit theaters this fall. Both films grapple with the ripple effects of gun violence and police brutality, with plots that feel like direct reflections of today’s headlines. “I think that’s our job as artists,” Cephas Jones says. “Not to be on TV or in movies just to do it, but to be part of a movement of stories that need to be told.”
Future
Aside from acting, Cephas Jones has a burgeoning music career: She’s in the midst of working on her first solo EP, which she hopes to release by the end of the year. The record is heavily influenced by artists she loves: Prince (her first concert), SZA, Solange, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, and … Enya? “I love me some Enya when I’m stressed out,” she admits, laughing. “People have been asking me, ‘When are you going to put out your own music?’ But first you have to find your voice—how you write and who you are as an artist—and I think I finally came to that point as a singer and musician.” It’s a place she says she couldn’t have reached without her fellow Hamilton cast members. “I can call them up and say, ‘Hey, could you get on this track of music?’ or get them to sit at a table and read something I wrote. As an artist, you need people like that to keep you grounded and inspire you. It’s important to have that kind of clique.”
