“I think of myself as a playwright, director and an actor and producer,” says Colman Domingo. “But then suddenly I saw on the cover of a magazine that I was a ‘movie star’. Right? I thought, Oh, that’s different. That’s a whole different beast.”
Domingo certainly looks like a movie star this morning. California light floods his home. He reclines in a Technicolor robe. Not just a star. A star of the old school.
He can, however, be forgiven for not immediately grasping that he had achieved that status. Domingo, who was raised in a working-class Pennsylvania household and is now in his mid-50s, has been striving hard since securing stage and TV roles at the end of the last century. But it was not until 2011, when he gained a Tony nomination for the Broadway musical The Scottsboro Boys, that he brushed the upper tiers of fame.
Over the past few years he has been everywhere. He is among the cast of the hugely influential TV series Euphoria. He was towards the front of the movies such as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Color Purple musical. Earlier this year he received a best-actor nomination at the Oscars for Rustin. The awards punters will astonished if he doesn’t get another for the imminent prison drama Sing Sing.
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“It sort of makes me smile,” he says. “I didn’t know that that was part of my path – to be a star, whatever that means. But I do appreciate that, at 54 years old, I know myself. I understand the responsibility of that.”
Domingo, an enormously warm personality, with a rumbling, musical voice, strikes me as the sort of fellow you can trust with the challenges of fame. He is a hard worker. He is funny but not frivolous.
“Earlier this year I was noted as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people,” he says, aghast. “And I thought, What? Well, now I have a responsibility. Well, now I have to be responsible to that. If people listen to what I say, I can make a tremendous impact. Whether it’s just the way I dress – it can be something as simple as the way I dress – which has been regarded as something wonderful!”
He’s not wrong. Nobody gave better suit at the last awards season. Vanity Fair blared that his Vuitton and Versace looks cemented his “status as red-carpet standout”. But none of that matters if you haven’t the acting chops. Domingo again confirms there is no such shortage with his performance as one of several inmates staging a play in Greg Kwedar’s ecstatically reviewed about the maximum-security prison in New York state. Paying tribute to the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts scheme, the film casts former inmates who had been on that programme alongside experienced professionals such as Domingo. No seams are visible as the camera pans from scheme alumnus to Oscar nominee.
“I feel like I acted as an example and as a colleague at the same time,” he says of the collaboration. “I wanted to meet these men where they lived – the fact that they had had training through the RTA programme. I’ve always been aware that you can get your training from anywhere. My training has come from working for years. I didn’t go to Yale or Juilliard or a conservatory. I’ve always respected the work as a craft. These individuals whom were cast were craftsmen. I left them where they were.”
The film offers a less harrowing picture of life inside than we have come to expect from movies such as The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke. We are left in no doubt that the performers are desperate to get out. But this is a place of hope.
“It was never something political or trying to be like Shawshank,” says Domingo. “It was really about how this programme transforms people. So it was about the interior life of creating art in this space, in this container. But we were clear. The container can’t seem like they’re on a vacation either.”
He talks a lot about how the scheme offered metaphorical release for the prisoners. They felt they could stretch beyond the confines. Domingo seems like a philosophical fellow. I wonder if he feels acting can do that for anyone. Has he found it a comfort? Has it proved therapeutic in times of trouble?
“I think so,” he says. “When I was a gawky teenager I got my first job at a Barnes & Noble bookstore. I used to take care of the travel section and the self-help section. But I knew I was trying to figure out what was going on inside me, what I was feeling as I was coming of age. Then, as I got into the theatre in my early 20s, I realised it was doing the same work. It was actually helping me give in more to my feelings. By putting my feet in someone else’s shoes. By understanding the psychology of different human beings.”
Domingo was the third of four children from a striving black family in Philadelphia. Mum worked in a bank when not caring for the family. His father left the home when Domingo was nine; the two, according to a 2022 interview, “didn’t have any sort of relationship”. He later studied journalism at college, but somewhere in there the theatrical bug gained traction.
“My mother said to take a class just for fun, because I was taking all matriculating classes for my journalism major,” he says. “I remembered there was a summer acting programme I took when I was maybe 12 years old. It felt so good, because I was a very shy kid, and it helped me get outside of my shyness. I thought maybe I could take acting classes in college. Then my teacher came to me one day and asked if I had thought of acting as a profession. I didn’t even know what that was.”
Domingo’s career demonstrates that significant reward can come for those who toil for decades at the coalface. He has the sort of face that gets noticed: handsome, but with an eccentricity that suits character roles. He has a wild range to his acting. Watch him as the heroic civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin in Rustin and then as the dissolute Mister in The Color Purple. Next year we should see him in the controversial role of Joe Jackson, father to Michael, in Antoine Fuqua’s biopic of the king of pop. You hone that sort of versatility when fighting through the ranks.
“I was very shy kid,” Domingo repeats. “I didn’t think I was attractive. I didn’t think I had any of those things that anyone who was in school plays had. They were popular. They were good-looking. I just didn’t think that was my path. So I did this stuff quietly. And I actually became a craftsman because of that. I latched on to the work. I love the work of research and exploration and giving yourself over.”
In 2024 we shouldn’t still find it worth remarking that Domingo is gay. But he is only the second out gay man in the near century-long history of the Oscars to be nominated for playing a gay character. Surely, after all the social changes of the past few decades, such successes should be more common. People from the LGBT+ communities must still feel as if they’re marching through glue on the way to equality.
“I love being regarded as an actor who is gay,” says Domingo. “But I’ve never limited myself in saying what I was able to play, whether I produce it or write it myself. What I’m interested in is in a broad breadth of experiences. I didn’t limit myself. So the industry didn’t put limitations on me. I think that’s the truth.”
He acknowledges that the parts were not always there.
“I think I would have preferred to just be an actor,” he says. “But because I wanted roles that are complex I had to write these complex representations of queer men. They weren’t out there. That’s how we take our power. That’s how we own our power in this industry.”
He laughs his charming laugh.
“I still get this every other day on Twitter: ‘I didn’t know Colman Domingo was gay.’ Were there supposed to be some indicators?”
Sing Sing is in cinemas from Friday, August 30th
