Anthony Ramos Knows Where He Came From

By the time you saw Anthony Ramos play the scrappy, optimistic lead Usnavi in the film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical In the Heights two years ago, he'd had a lifetime of rehearsal. The born-and-bred New Yorker had already experienced every aspect of its world of Washington Heights—the street rhythms, the ambition, the proud Latinidad, the encroaching gentrification, the hope in community—and that knowledge informed what was one of the brightest male performances in a movie musical in years, bursting with authenticity and hometown pride.

The path to that role—and to what's come since, including his leading role in the new blockbuster Transformers: Rise of the Beasts—was as serendipitously unexpected as the movements of the city it reflects. The Bushwick native grew up singing along to all kinds of music, from Usher and the Temptations to fellow Puerto Ricans like Marc Anthony, Daddy Yankee, and Ivy Queen. But he wasn't wearing out cast recordings yet.

"I was playing baseball, and I was good, too," he tells me over coffee near his apartment in Greenpoint. Ramos had made the JV team and, though he was miffed at being benched his junior year, was planning to play in college when all his applications were withdrawn—he hadn't filled out his financial aid forms. The stormy 'What the fuck am I going to do?' moment was followed by a silver lining when his drama teacher, Sara Steinweiss, suggested he audition for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy near Lincoln Center. That extra time he'd acquired while on the bench turned out to be a gift, as what he thought was a talent show tryout turned out to be an audition for the school musical. He accidentally caught the acting bug and joined the school's theater program at Steinweiss's insistence. "I started really enjoying the process of finding a character and their motivations—why does this person love that person, that kind of thing," he recalls. "As a kid, I was mad curious. I was scared sometimes, like I had to be convinced to learn how to ride a bike, or you had to convince me to jump off the thing or dive off the deep end but once I did, I was in and not coming out."

Musicals, Ramos says, gave him a way to continue presenting a song's story his own way. He was all in on acting, and Steinweiss paid for his AMDA application and got him a full scholarship through a program established by Jerry Seinfeld. His studies were going great, but there weren't too many roles lined up on the horizon and the hope was beginning to fade from his eyes. Then he caught one of the final performances of the Broadway run of In the Heights. "It was one of those things where I wanted to quit acting, I was very discouraged. I wasn't getting any roles coming out of college," he says. "This was the first show I'd ever seen where the people sounded like those who were familiar to me because the vernacular is so Latino-from-New York. A lot of us have that same kind of swing, that came from a hip hop culture that really brought our communities closer together. It was all these people onstage that felt so familiar to me. They felt like my cousins, or Leo from the corner store who would give my family and me free candy, you know? All the best parts of the hood were onstage."

A year after graduating in 2011, he understudied the lead part of Usnavi in a Salt Lake City production of Heights and, just two years after that, booked the gig that would set his career on its path, the double role of John Laurens and Philip Hamilton in Miranda's workshop production of Hamilton. The musical, of course, exploded into the zeitgeist and carried Ramos from the Public Theater to Broadway until he bowed out in 2016. Spike Lee saw the show five times and asked the actor to join his Netflix series, based on his debut film She's Gotta Have It, as Mars Blackmon, the role which Lee himself had made iconic back in 1986.

After playing Lady Gaga's pre-fame best friend in Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born remake in 2018, Ramos gave Usnavi another go-around at the Kennedy Center's production of Heights, which Miranda saw and tweeted was a "perfect" "fit" of a performance. Fate locked him into the starring role for Jon M. Chu's film version, where Ramos came face to face with Marc Anthony, who played his uncle. "I was freaking out. I was hyped to just have a scene with him, but then a production assistant pulls up to my trailer and says Marc wants to see me. I'm like, what? Most of the time, you don't really hang with anybody before you shoot your scene," he says. "But there we were, shooting the shit for two, three hours before work. He just wanted to kick it, there was nothing extra to it, just, 'What's good, pa?'" The two Nuyoricans became fast friends.

By this point, Ramos had lived all over the city: Bushwick, Bensonhurst, Park Slope, the Upper West Side and, of course, Washington Heights while shooting the film. Having met and worked with his heroes—plus developing a fruitful parallel career as a solo recording artist, including his new song "Villano"—filled him with gratitude towards his hometown and the opportunities it had presented him. This finally overflowed into Ramos choosing to pay it forward to other low-income New Yorkers seeking access to arts education, setting up a scholarship in his name through the Scholarship Plus program. Kate Fenneman, formerly a director of the Seinfeld Scholarship Program, and Steinweiss, who's remained a close friend and mentor, seated at each of Ramos’s premieres, lead his proactive bit of outreach.

"A lot of it comes out of my pocket," he says, explaining that the scholarship is now looking to put its third student through college. "I put it in my deals, I'll ask, 'Can you pay this to me and this to my scholarship?' Sometimes it comes up that, 'Oh my gosh, we have no money.' Well, alright, if you have no money to pay me, at least give $25,000 to my scholarship because I know you have a fund in whatever bank you have that you can't use because that's literally what the tax deductible money is from. It's supposed to be used for only charitable reasons, so here's the charitable reason."

At thirty-one, Ramos is not too far off from remembering feeling like a brand new person, living a completely different life going to college on the Upper West Side from his Brooklyn home. With a Grammy on his mantle for the Hamilton cast recording, his new central part in the Transformers franchise, as well as projects helmed by Steven Spielberg's and Ryan Coogler's media companies, Ramos finds himself at a happy medium between furthering his own expansive ambitions and knowing the value of passing it forward. "I was never homeless, but I remember what it was like not having money to eat and not having a MetroCard," he says. "I think the two essential things, especially for the homeless kids, is they need to eat and they need to get around. If they can do those two things, then at least they have a chance to get a job, a chance to see something else, to give themselves a shot. I know what it’s worth."

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is now playing in theaters. Read this story and many more in print by ordering our sixth issue here. Ramos has selected Scholarship Plus, which offers mentorship and financial support to low-income New York City students pursuing college education, as the recipient of proceeds from direct sales of his cover of CERO06.

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