Politics & Power Quote by Taye Diggs

What jumps out is how bluntly desire and representation get braided into craft. Diggs isn’t talking about “prestige” or box-office calculus; he’s describing the jolt of recognition that comes when a project aligns logistics (New York, an ensemble) with an image ecosystem he rarely got offered. “Turned me on” is doing real work here: it’s attraction, yes, but also awakening - the sense that a film can be a social space he wants to inhabit, not just a role he can play.

The context matters: The Best Man arrived at the tail end of the 1990s, when Black film in the mainstream was often forced into narrow lanes - trauma, struggle, comic sidekick, moral lesson. Diggs signals that the movie’s hook wasn’t simply “positive images,” but a lot of them. Plural. Abundance. An ensemble suggests a community where no single character has to stand in for everyone, and where Blackness gets to be varied: ambitious, messy, stylish, romantic, competitive, tender. That breadth is the subtext of “strong.”

New York, too, is code. It’s not just a shooting location; it’s cultural legitimacy, theater-trained energy, a cosmopolitan Black professional class on screen and off. Diggs is naming the off-camera magnetism of a set that feels like a gathering of peers, and the on-camera politics of normalcy - not sanitized, but fully lived. The intent reads clear: he chose the film because it offered a world worth joining, and worth being seen in.