Lin-Manuel Miranda’s New Film “Octet” Stars All of Your Favorites
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s New Film “Octet” Stars All of Your Favorites
Maxwell RabbWed, April 15, 2026 at 4:56 PM UTC
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Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Octet” Cast is Star-StuddedGetty Images
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s highly anticipated second film, Octet, unveiled a cast so stacked that it feels less like a typical movie role call than a musical-theater fever dream.
Miranda dropped the star-studded list via his Instagram Tuesday morning, topped with two heavy-hitters: Amanda Seyfried, fresh off belting out shaker hymns in The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), as Jessica, and Rachel Zegler, whose career singing for the silver screen includes West Side Story (2021). The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023), and, most recently, Snow White (2025), as Velma.
The Hamilton author and star announced that he planned to return to filmmaking in early April with this adaptation of Dave Malloy’s Off-Broadway play Octet. The chamber musical tells the story of eight people who meet in a church basement as part of an internet addiction group (something anyone alive in the 21st century should probably consider).
The leader of the digitally dependent support group, Paula, will be played by the beloved Abbot Elementary star Sheryl Lee Ralph. The rest of the line-up includes Jonathan Groff, who millennials know from Glee and Gen-Z knows from Frozen, as Henry; Gaten Matarazzo, who recently concluded his decade-long tenure on Stranger Things as Toby; Philipa Soo, the inaugural Eliza Hamilton in Hamilton, as Karly; and Tramell Tillman, who won the hearts of the audience in Severance. One exciting new face is Paul-Jordan Jansen, a breakout star in Broadway’s Sweeney Todd revival, who will play Ed in the new movie.
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This is the second time Miranda will rework an Off-Broadway play. In 2021, adapted Rent creator Jonathan Larson’s musical tick, tick…BOOM! for his feature film debut. For the adaptation, Miranda managed to tap some similarly attention-grabbing names, including Andrew Garfield shortly after his stint as Spider-Man and the endlessly famous Vanessa Hudgens.
The original tick, tick…BOOM!, performed by Larson as a one-man rock-and-roll musical, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Larson’s struggles as a young playwright in 1980s New York. Following Larson’s death in 1996, playwright David Auburn penned two additional characters for the play. On paper, the monologue-heavy musical was anything but movie-ready, yet Miranda decided to tackle the daunting challenge. Despite any possible misgivings, he produced a film version that raked in (mostly) positive reviews from critics and scored Garfield an Oscar nomination.
The stage version of this chamber a cappella musical, Octet, shares the same limitations, making it nearly impossible to adapt for an exciting screen adaptation. But Miranda proved us wrong once with his feature debut. And with this cast, people will almost certainly storm theaters to see this new movie.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
