Lin-Manuel Miranda has a shocking secret. Or technically, his wife does. Vanessa Nadal, who’s married to the three-time Tony-winning composer behind In The Heights and Hamilton, does not like musicals. Actually, let Miranda rephrase: “She just likes good shit. We’ll be seeing a musical and they’ll repeat the chorus, and she’ll be like, ‘Why are they saying that again?’ She’s a logic monster.”

So when their friend Dave Malloy invited the couple to his off-Broadway chamber-choir musical Octet in the fall of 2019, Nadal’s review took Miranda by surprise. “Before the last song ended and the lights went up for the bows, Vanessa turned to me and said, ‘If you took me to more shows like this, I’d go see theater with you.’ That’s a three-star Michelin for my wife. That’s the best thing she’s ever said about a musical, ever.”

Seven years later, Nadal will be traveling to a different type of theater to see Octet, a feature film directed by her husband. It’s Miranda’s second directorial effort after his critically acclaimed 2021 adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s musical Tick, Tick... Boom!. But even during the editing process for that film, Miranda’s mind was on Octet. “If I get a chance to make another movie, what would I want to do?” he remembers thinking. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Octet.”

On paper, Octet is a bit of a tough sell, even for the most intense musical theater fans. Set entirely in a rundown church basement, the musical follows eight strangers attending an internet-addiction support group and sharing their struggles through songs about social media, memes, Candy Crush, Twitter discourse, Reddit threads, cancel culture, dating apps, incels, and porn addiction. There’s also no musical accompaniment: It’s entirely a cappella, filled with intricate, complex, and sometimes discordant harmonies. Perhaps that’s why Octet ultimately didn’t transfer to Broadway, despite winning a slew of Off-Broadway awards. “I was respectful of the journey that show was going to go on,” says Miranda. “When they started licensing the show, I raised my hand and said, ‘Can we make this as a movie?’”

So Miranda and Malloy got to work. “For me, this is sort of The Breakfast Club meets A Chorus Line meets The Matrix,” says Miranda. “It’s eight people in a room. But once they start singing, this technological world to which they find themselves inextricably bound shows up in unexpected and unsettling ways.”

A musical about the many horrors of the digital age might not sound like the most obvious choice for a man arguably best known for penning G-rated Disney bops like “How Far I’ll Go” and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” But if there’s one thing Miranda knows, it’s good writing.

“I don’t think a week goes by for me where I don’t hear someone saying something that Dave hasn’t already addressed,” he says. The rise of AI into the mainstream, which began after Octet debuted, also makes the show’s consideration of the internet—which its characters refer to almost exclusively as “the Monster”—feel more prescient than ever. “I was waiting for my flight this morning, and this Puerto Rican couple recognizes me, and we get to chatting. They said, ‘I don’t think our brains are wired to handle so much information from our phones all the time.’ That’s literally one of Jessica’s lines.’”

To pull off Octet, Miranda and his longtime casting director Bernie Telsey needed an ensemble with a particular set of skills. “I don’t just need theater kids: I need choir kids,” Miranda told Telsey. “I need people who can sing and listen at the same time.” Of course, Miranda was once a choir kid himself, so he knew what to look for. “You get to a point where you learn your hymns and your songs so well, you can have full-on conversations with your face while singing your tenor part,” he says with a laugh. “So, I knew that’s who I was after.”

In true choir-kid fashion, Miranda began by finding his sopranos. First, there’s Golden Globe winner Rachel Zegler, who will play the title character in Evita on Broadway next year. Zegler also happens to be a Dave Malloy superfan who reached out to Miranda when she heard he was working on the project. “She’s like a little musical theater prodigy,” says Miranda. “She can do anything.” In Octet, she plays Velma, the newest member of the support group.

Next came Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried, who plays the aforementioned, recently canceled Jessica. “It’s hard to tell from movie musicals whether someone can for real sing and blend,” says Miranda. “She’s been in some really big ones. Those Mamma Mia! movies are big. Les Mis is big.” What ultimately won Miranda over, though, was a 90-second clip of Seyfried singing “California” to Jimmy Fallon while accompanying herself on the dulcimer. “When I saw her on The Tonight Show singing Joni Mitchell—fully live, dulcimer, crushing it—I was like, Oh, she can really, really do this at an elite level.”

The altos are Phillipa Soo and Abbott Elementary Emmy winner Sheryl Lee Ralph. Soo broke through in both the original cast of Hamilton and as the title role in Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 Off-Broadway. “We share musical custody of Phillipa Soo,” Miranda jokes. “She’s my Bernadette Peters. As long as I’m writing music, I’ll be writing music [for her]. After the demo, Pippa’s usually my first phone call. There is nothing she cannot sing.” In Octet, she plays dating-app-obsessed Karly. Ralph, meanwhile, plays group leader Paula. Though she’s a musical theater veteran who originated the role of Deena in Dreamgirls, Ralph was a bit intimidated after realizing what she had signed up for. “She was nervous. She hadn’t done this in a while,” says Miranda. “She put her head down—it’s a lot of music. She’s extraordinary.”

Time for the tenors. Tony-winner Jonathan Groff stars as video-game-obsessed Henry; he’s also good friends with the show’s original Henry, Lucille Lortel nominee Alex Gibson. “When I talked to Jonathan about this, he was like, ‘I go to the same gym as Alex. That’s my honey,’” says Miranda. So that was a nice connection between the OG octet and the new one.”

Another IRL friendship played an important role in Octet. While sitting in on rehearsals for the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd—directed by Miranda’s longtime collaborator Tommy Kail—Miranda saw Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo sing live for the first time. Theater actor Paul-Jordan Jansen was also in the ensemble of that show. Matarazzo, a tenor, stars in Octet as a nihilist who, like his Sweeney character, is named Toby; Jansen, a bass, plays incel-adjacent Ed.

Severance Emmy-winner and bass Tramell Tillman rounds out the cast as Marvin, a neurochemist questioning his relationship to faith and reality. “I’m the only person on earth who hasn’t seen Severance. But I had seen the clip of Tramell dancing with the marching band from season two of Severance, so I knew he was musical,” says Miranda. “He’s such an incredibly gifted and thoughtful actor. I just really wanted him in that room.”

Unlike the big-budget Disney films Miranda is accustomed to working on, Octet was independently financed. “We raised the money ourselves to make this film. We are looking for distribution. That was also new to me,” he says. “Rehearsal is cheaper than shooting. So, we rehearsed for five weeks. Then [had] 22 days to shoot.” By Miranda’s estimates, maybe 50% of the film’s vocals were captured live.

Why not more? “I’m not a Tom Hooper absolutist that it all has to be sung live,” he says, name-checking the director of the 2012 Les Mis film. “If you’re dancing, even Gene Kelly wasn’t singing live.” At the same time, “Dave has moments that are so vocally dense and verbally dense that it’s actually harder to lip-sync than it is to just get it live. You can’t do it. You’ve got to get it live.” The film’s opening number was shot live in one uninterrupted take. “The other thing I experimented with is, I have a lot of oners,” he adds. “A lot of complex stuff is happening, and the camera’s just not cutting.”

Now that he’s helmed two films, Miranda is more equipped to unpack the differences between composing and directing. “I love being a composer. I love being the guy to bring in the songs, and working with directors to unlock the songs and adapt the songs,” he says. “But weirdly, something I’ve discovered is that when you’re directing, you’re answering every question to every department. [So] the movies come out almost more personal than the ones you wrote the score for.”

Shooting Octet actually reminded him of a deeply personal experience: his wedding to Vanessa. “The thing I kept saying over the course of this shoot was, ‘I’m planning 22 weddings,’” says Miranda. In this case, no two weddings were alike. “Some days I have a civil ceremony, and it’s just the octet in the room all day. Some days I have really elaborate special effects. When you plan a wedding, every detail ends up being personal because you’re thinking, What do I want on a special day when I am filming this song, and it’s my only chance to get this song? The other thing that makes that metaphor work is, it’s your wedding. You can’t get bogged down in the details. You have to stay fucking present.”

At present, things are quite busy for Miranda. Disney’s live-action Moana hits theaters this week. His new musical Warriors will soon run on Broadway across the street from Hamilton, which is now in its 11th year. New York City Center is also honoring him by remounting In the Heights in October. The casts for both Warriors and In the Heights are being finalized as we speak. “I’m juggling, but the plates are in the air,” says Miranda.

But right now, it’s all about Octet. The power of film will allow the film’s audience to be transported out of that dingy church basement and into the worlds the actors are singing about. “How do we say this without giving anything away? The way in which they share their stories of addiction has a way of summoning the worlds they’re talking about,” he says. “The internet comes to them. Their addictions have a way of entering the space, and that changes and morphs over the course of the evening in startling and surprising and sometimes scary ways.”