Tony winner Daveed Diggs, who won his statue for his dual portrayal of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, joined host Kelly Ripa and Tony Goldwyn on Live with Kelly November 8.

The actor admitted that he never expected to win. “You knew Lin [-Manuel Miranda] was going to win everything; you knew he was going to rap his acceptance speeches, that’s what Lin does,” he said. Diggs figured stressing over his speech and what to do was a moot point because he believed he had no shot at winning. Still, the night before he wasn’t sleeping and wrote a rap. “It was so bad, it was so dumb,” he said. “If you’re not gonna body Lin, then don’t do it.”

In his acceptance speech, Diggs tells a story of his preschool days when the kids were asked to perform for the class and he didn’t want to do it. Instead, he wanted to do a gymnastics routine with this dad.

“One: my mom gave me permission to do something that everybody else wasn’t doing, and two: my dad supported me and made it possible.”

“I think a lot of us are here because people in our lives did that.”

Watch the full acceptance speech below:

Diggs said on the morning show that he had been thinking about the story all day because his father saw Hamilton for the first time on the afternoon before the awards ceremony.

Ripa remarked that the Tony Award acceptance speeches always seem “so much more eloquent than all of the other acceptance speeches in entertainment.”