Can I complain about something media-related? Ever since Graydon Carter left Vanity Fair, their cover stories have been THE WORST. It’s like the VF journalists doing celebrity cover stories have been encouraged to be as obtuse as possible, and they’re told to spend the first half of their long-read pieces not even quoting from their subject. So it is with VF’s “Holiday Issue” cover subject, Lin Manuel Miranda. Miranda is quotable, interesting, passionate, political and somewhat macabre and fatalistic. This piece should have been a slam-dunk full of interesting quotes from Miranda about EVERYTHING. Instead, they spent like three pages regurgitating the plot of the old Mary Poppins and the new Poppins movie, all before Miranda is even quoted once. You can read this mess here. Some highlights:

On moving to London to film ‘Mary Poppins Returns’: “The other thing you have to know is my wife is Dominican and Austrian. She was born in Sweden and wants to live everywhere in the world. My first musical is literally about how I do not want to leave Washington Heights.”

On watching the original ‘Poppins’: “I couldn’t get through ‘Feed the Birds.’ I was very sensitive to minor-key music, and that song was so sad that I don’t think I saw the ending of Mary Poppins until I was grown, because I would just cry. I loved ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.’ I loved Dick Van Dyke. I loved the whole movie but then that one song was so sad I kind of never survived it.”

He often had emotional reactions to music as a kid: “My family had so many stories about that, about how Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ would come on and they’d have to change the channel because I would burst into tears. You know what? I actually remember the feeling. I remember it was so many ‘nos’ in the lyrics. ‘No New Year’s Day to celebrate’—it felt apocalyptic to me as a little kid. ‘No songs to sing’—I was like, ‘Turn it off!’ I was very sensitive. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ apparently just laid me out when I was an infant. My parents have all kinds of stories like that.”

He’s drawn to fatalistic stories of men who die young: “[Bob] Fosse, [Jonathan] Larson, Hamilton—they’ve all got this awareness of the ticking clock and I think I very much have that, the awareness of ‘All right, this is how much time we have. How much can we get done while we’re here?’… I think the tragedy that Larson did not get to see his own legacy resonated with me enormously. But, it was his worth that I really responded to—more than his passing. I felt so seen by the character of Mark in Rent when I first saw it—the guy who just films everything because he doesn’t really want to engage.”

Where his fatalism comes from: “I had a close friend who passed away when I was about three years old. That’s among my earlier memories. It was a kid who was in my class, in my pre-K. It was one of those tragic things.” I asked if he minded explaining what had happened. “It’s really sort of not my story to tell,” he replied, “but she drowned. It was just one of those horrible stories where no one had an eye on her in a critical moment and that happened. No one’s fault. It’s just what happened…. When dying is concrete, and it’s someone you played in the sandbox with? I think it becomes very real in a way. I’m sure that’s a central part of it for me.”

[From Vanity Fair]

The interview is actually a sad read, because so much of what Miranda discusses with VF is about his sense of urgency, his decades-long fears that he will not have the chance to do everything he wants to do because he’ll die suddenly. It made me sad because… what if he’s right? The fear of death envelopes so many artists, and no one knows what will happen. At least Miranda has been appreciated and recognized in his time. But lord, this was fatalistic even for a magazine which used to regularly put dead Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe on their covers several times a year.

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Photos courtesy of Getty, Vanity Fair.