Taye Diggs says “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” love interest Angela Bassett ‘wasn’t impressed’ by him in “Rent”

Angela Bassett didn’t groove with her future costar’s performance in his most acclaimed project.

Taye Diggs, who played the actress’ Jamaican lover in 1998’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, said that the What’s Love Got to Do With It actress was not particularly enthused by his turn as the sellout landlord in Rent on Broadway.

“Angela Bassett went and came to see Rent and she wasn’t impressed,” Diggs told Keke Palmer on her podcast Baby, This is Keke Palmer. “She wasn’t impressed.”

The Best Man actor said that his agent told him about Bassett’s indifference to his performance in the musical and chalked it up to his character being the least important of the principal cast members.

“Rent was that show where everybody was like, ‘Okay, well, come see these kids in Rent,’” he recalled. “And they were like, ‘Okay, well, we have this young man who’s auditioning.’ ‘How can I see him?’ Okay, come see the show Rent. And I had the smallest role in Rent of the main characters. So I was like, ‘Okay, this isn’t going to be. I’m not going to get any jump off of this. I’ll just ride it out as hard as I can. And then the next thing, that’ll be my jump off. And luckily, that’s what it was, Angela Bassett in How Stella Got Her Groove [Back].”

Instead, Diggs said that Bassett was more enthused by his performance on Guiding Light.

“She saw the soap opera and I was playing this character on Guiding Light called Sugar Hill,” he explained. “And she saw a little bit of sexiness in Sugar Hill and then she was like, ‘Okay, bring him in.’”

How Stella Got Got Her Groove Back marked Diggs’ film debut, and he felt that he had hit his first post-Rent career milestone unfairly late.

“For a while, you know, I really wasn’t really enjoying where I was [in my career],” he explained. “I was expecting to get How Stella Got Her [Groove Back]. I was expecting it. Like, it came too late for me.”

Diggs explained that at the time, he thought he deserved breakout success at the same level as his Rent costars — if not even bigger stardom.

“Idina [Menzel], she had got a record deal, Jesse Martin had got a TV show,” he said, laughing. “I was the last one to hit. So I was like, ‘Damn, y’all!’ I’m like, in my head I was like, ‘I’m more talented than all y’all! I’m the last — what’s going on?’”

He continued, “Finally, I got How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and I was like, ‘Okay, now we at the party. Let’s go,’” he said.

However, Diggs admitted that he wouldn’t have been satisfied if Stella marked the peak of his movie career.

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“I was like, ‘Okay, well, what’s next? What’s next?’” he recalled. “Because at the time it was, I was like, ‘Okay, I wanna be the next Will Smith.’ Because I was looking in. You know what I mean? I was like, ‘I want that.’ Because he’s just Black enough where he can be Black, but not threatening to the white people — he could cross over.’”

Though he never quite matched the global superstardom of Smith, Diggs still enjoyed a successful film career, appearing in movies like Brown Sugar, Equilibrium, Chicago, The Wood, Go, and the film adaptation of Rent.

Listen to the full conversation between Diggs and Palmer above.

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