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Lin-Manuel Miranda talks to Ed Potton about his two new films Encanto and Tick Tick . . . Boom! - and how Stephen Sondheim became his creative counsellor.

‘Idefinitely hear a ticking clock in my life,” Lin-Manuel Miranda says. “I think that’s clear from a lot of the work I’ve done.” In 2015 the goateed New Yorker somersaulted to the top of the musical-theatre tree as the creator and star of Hamilton. The bravura, hip-hop-powered tale of Alexander Hamilton, one of the more obscure founding fathers of America, became a stage sensation in New York, London and Sydney and won Miranda two Tonys, an Olivier and a Pulitzer, plus an estimated fortune of £60 million (NZ$115 million). “You write like you’re running out of time,” one of the songs in the show, Non-Stop, said of his restless title character.

Well, life has imitated art because in the subsequent six years Miranda has been everywhere. He has written songs for Moana, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the forthcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. He has had big acting roles as Jack the lamplighter in Mary Poppins Returns and the balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials. He has voiced animated characters for the DuckTales series and Vivo, a film for which he also wrote the songs, and this year his stage musical In the Heights became a Hollywood movie. Now, when you would be expecting him to be having a breather, Miranda, 41, has two of the biggest projects of his life coming out within days of each other. Released in cinemas internationally next week is Encanto, an animated extravaganza from Disney for which he wrote a suite of songs that embrace Latin, pop, R’n’B and show tunes. Already in cinemas and on Netflix is Tick, Tick . . . Boom! – there’s that clock again – an explosively moving adaptation of Jonathan “Rent” Larson’s musical in which Miranda makes his debut as a feature director. Phew. I feel tired just typing it.

Does he ever feel overwhelmed? “Well, I chose to do it,” he says via Zoom from his home in New York, where he lives with his wife, Vanessa Nadal, and their sons, Sebastian, 7, and Francisco, 3. “That’s an important mindshift sometimes. What I learnt from my time at university [he went to Wesleyan in Connecticut] was, ‘Oh, these things can be in conversation with each other. What I’m learning here is applicable there.” “Besides, he adds, “I don’t feel like I’m running out of time so much as that’s the fantasy. Non-Stop is the fantasy of what a writer’s life is like. It’s much more tedious and slow than that. I’m incredibly impatient to get my work out into the world, but I also work on projects that take years to complete.”

Encanto, directed by Byron Howard (Tangled,