There are more than a thousand caricatures on the walls at Sardi's, the old Broadway hang, but these days you can't set foot in the dining room without noticing one drawing in particular staring back at you: Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's a fickle business. But Javier Muñoz, a week into his tenure as the new full-time Hamilton, walks past Cartoon Lin, so busy being gracious to the swarm of restaurant staff who have gathered to greet him that it's unclear if he even knows it's there. The staff barely even registers the other patrons, which is fine. We're not the new Hamilton. We're not even the old Hamilton, whereas Javier is both: He was Miranda's alternate from the show's inception, and from the show's inception, he was the natural choice for Miranda's designated replacement, once Miranda was ready to move on to go cure poverty and hunger and all manner of illness and sadness.

Muñoz doesn't have a caricature yet at Sardi's, but that's okay because his face is like a very handsome caricature of a very handsome face. His smile is so wide that it seems to wrap around his jaw. His eyebrows are incredible yardsticks of endocrinatic braggery that shade his eyes and jump on his forehead. The tip of his nose reaches down, and the tip of his chin points upward; his face gets so animated when he performs that it looks like they might kiss.

He looks, in other words, nothing like Lin-Manuel Miranda, the puppy-eyed and wholesome-seeming man who wrote Hamilton and originated the role, and who left the show earlier this summer. Miranda has always seemed like a public intellectual, or like a really great high school teacher you'd remember with infinite fondness. Muñoz is different. He's sexy and puts his body into the show. He writhes and he wiggles, taking his job as a founding father less seriously than the show's founding father. This Hamilton is a man before he is a father; he's the Hamilton you're still thinking about after the stage darkens and the theater empties and you're home in bed and the lights are out. A friend who's seen both men puts it like this: early in the show, when Hamilton arrives in New York, naïve and aching to be taken seriously, Miranda sells it better—but when Hamilton graduates to political machinations and adultery, Muñoz is much more credible.

Muñoz has been a Miranda company man for the last ten years—a member of his theater brat pack, like Christopher Jackson and Renée Elise Goldsberry. And yes, that was Muñoz, playing Hamilton the first time the Obamas came. He is effortlessly Hamilton, maybe even more effortlessly than the guy who wrote the musical. The one thing he isn't is Lin-Manuel Miranda.

He's the guy after Lin-Manuel Miranda, and that's got to be at least a little bit difficult.

But ever since the official announcement in June that Javier would be taking over, throughout the run of interviews he gave, there was no trace of anything but gratitude and humility. And yes, sure, those are easy things to fake in a Q&A. But that's just how Javier sounds—that's how he's always sounded. Listen to what he said about performing for the Obamas, during an early preview ahead of the show's Broadway opening:

"With all due respect to our President, because I love our President, I wasn't thinking about him. It was Lin's first opportunity to see the show. So he had three opportunities in previews just to watch and craft it to make any final changes. So that was my priority, to make sure I'm telling this as clearly and as fully as I can for Lin so he can leave this and this viewing and percolate with ideas about what he wants to cut, change, tweak or leave alone. And that's my job. And so that's really what I was thinking about."

Javier's life story—the mere fact that he's even still here at all—might explain his open-heartedness, his refusal to take his good fortune for granted. But it could just as easily explain the opposite. Brushes with death don't always bring out the best in people; sometimes the fear of mortality, of throwing away your shot, or having it taken from you, can wreck a man, harden him into chasing glory at the cost of his soul. Javier nearly had his life taken from him, twice.

A thing people love about Hamilton is its optimism—how you leave the theater on a wave of goodwill. It comes in handy as you're immediately threatened with both Times Square and the prospect of a Trump presidency. So how much is Javier and how much is Hamilton? Did repeated daily exposure to Hamilton help make Javier this way? Or did Javier bring just as much to Hamilton as it's brought to him?

His parents already had three boys when Javier came along—seven years after their youngest, a surprise to them all. The Muñozes started out in Brooklyn housing projects in East New York before finding a small house in New Jersey. Little Javier, then 6, had tested as gifted and talented, and there was a fund for him to attend a prep school. But Javier didn't want to go to prep school in Jersey. He wanted to go back to Brooklyn.

His wish came true, sort of, in his teens, when his parents separated and his mother moved to Canarsie to a one-bedroom apartment that she and he and his youngest brother, David, shared—his oldest brothers were already on their own. His father had been an illustrator at an ad agency, but the agency shut down and he got a job as a doorman downtown on Fifth Avenue. At night he'd clean offices. His mother worked several medical jobs at once. Meanwhile, David, who was seven years older, watched over Javier, scrutinizing report cards and attending parent-teacher conferences.

Back in Brooklyn, he experienced first-hand the way a minority kid could fall through the cracks, even in such a diverse part of Brooklyn. "Daily things," he says now, "like when an adult is talking to a group of kids and looks at all the other kids but doesn't look at the minority. We feel that. You're made to feel different. Like you are separate."

Javier felt different wherever he went. In elementary school, he had been bussed to a program for gifted kids a couple neighborhoods over, where his skin was too dark. After school he came home to Canarsie, where his skin was too light. He spoke clearly and eloquently, which came off as a kind of snobbery to his neighbors. He was fat then, too, he says. None of this was a recipe for homecoming king in even the most enlightened of neighborhoods, much much much less a place like 1980s Canarsie. "I was called a fag, I was called fatty," he says. "I was made fun of for being a nerd. I was made fun of for being Puerto Rican. I was made fun of for being so light skinned. I mean, all the things. Everything."