Colman Domingo, the ordinary guy who became an extraordinary actor

Colman Domingo is an ordinary guy. So much so that his life doesn’t change at awards galas or when drinking champagne, but in supermarkets and gyms, serving cocktails in bars, or buying mud masks. Domingo’s life has taken many twists and turns, like anyone else’s, on the path to becoming who he is today: one of the most brilliant and versatile actors of his generation, who has two consecutive best actor nominations at the Academy Awards. Last year, nominated for Rustin, he lost out to Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer. This year, he will have to compete with Adrien Brody, Ralph Fiennes, Timothée Chalamet and Sebastian Stan; that is, he will go up against an architect, a cardinal, Bob Dylan, and Donald Trump, playing a prisoner who teaches drama classes. It won’t be easy for him. But it’s not impossible, either.

Domingo is savoring his success, feeling lucky. He is an increasingly frequent name at major Hollywood film events and is making a name for himself in the rest of the world. And it is little wonder as he is involved in theater (acting and directing), in television series (such as Fear the Walking Dead and Euphoria), in cinema (he has 50 movie credits to his name and no fewer than seven awaiting release) and, this year, he will also host the Met Gala, the great global fashion event, which will focus on dandyism among Black men. But it has not always been like this and that is why he is enjoying the aftertaste that recognition and, above all, consistent work are leaving him with. He knows the luxury of having it, because he experienced many early rejections. Until one day, in the gym, everything changed.

It was 2012 and Domingo was living in New York with his husband, Raúl Domingo, where they had moved from California in an attempt to break out of the pigeonholing of years of small theater productions. He enjoyed it, but he wanted to do something more. Domingo was the third of four siblings, a skinny and shy boy, raised in Philadelphia with few resources by his mother, a bank employee, and his stepfather, a floor sander; his father, originally from Belize, abandoned them when he was nine years old. He had a lisp, loved the violin, and was not the most popular kid in class: that was Will Smith, who he went to high school with, although they were not friends; they belonged to different social classes, he explained.

Later, he studied and directed his passion for the arts into making small spaces for himself on the scene. But he needed more. He attended castings, served drinks — he always says in interviews that he was a great waiter — and did up to eight auditions a day. There was one in which he played the flute. It was in 2014, for the series Boardwalk Empire, where he was supposed to dance and sing; he was good at it, having been nominated for a Tony. He auditioned several times. He made it through to the end. He had high hopes. But then his agent called him: the historical consultant had realized that in the 1920s and 1930s, when the series was set, that role could not have been performed by a Black man. And that’s when he exploded. He collapsed between the weight machines and shouted: “That’s it!”

“I can’t. This is killing me,” he recalls saying to himself, as he recounted in a recent interview in The New Yorker. Colman and Raúl talked. They considered making changes, putting an end to his passion of over 20 years. But a friend called him, reminding him that his agent had wanted to meet him for some time. He showed up for the meeting with his arms folded: his body language was already displaying where his mind was. However, they listened to each other and changed strategy. It worked: in a short time he got an audition for Fear the Walking Dead, where after a modest first season he became the lead in the successful Walking Dead spin-off. It was then that he decided to stop going to castings: if they wanted him, they could call him. And they did.

It wasn’t out of ego, but necessity. The change in agent and attitude — as well as, as he has reflected on occasion, his way of acting, gradually becoming more open and natural — changed his life. It’s not that he hadn’t done anything before: he had worked on episodes of Law & Order or The Knick, and in films like Lincoln, The Butler and Selma, but the zombie series, and then the teen drama Euphoria (where he played Ali, a recovering addict, in a role that earned him an Emmy), catapulted him if not to fame, to achieving the body of work and recognition that he was seeking. From there, he flourished on-screen and on the red carpets, where he has become one of the most-watched stars due to his colorful, original and elegant sartorial choices including skirts, frock coats, sashes, brocades, snazzy suits and bow ties, many of them by Valentino, with whom he maintains a close relationship.

This decade, in which he entered his fifties after more than three decades of acting, is becoming his own. Gone are the days of working as a waiter, dancing at bar mitzvahs, being a bakery assistant, working as an officiant at weddings (well, he still does that, but just for pleasure), and working a variety of part-time jobs. In 2020 he started the upward curve on Zola, where he worked with Riley Keough, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, with Viola Davis. Between filming The Color Purple — where he reprised Danny Glover’s role in the original — and Rustin — a film about civil rights activist Bayard Rustin produced by the Obamas — he barely had 18 days off. He used those to film Sing Sing, which he accepted after reading a newspaper article (there was no script at the time). The role earned him a second Oscar nomination, in addition to recognition at festivals such as Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, Seattle, Austin, Washington, and San Francisco, among others.

If Domingo’s work life has been hectic, his personal life has been, for the last 20 years, something of a bed of roses. But just as normal, casual, and fortunate. While he was living in San Francisco, he went to a large pharmacy-supermarket in Berkeley, northern California. He was going to buy a mud mask when he crossed paths in the parking lot with a dark-skinned, long-haired guy with “these eyes,” as he told GQ. They exchanged looks, but nothing more; the actor tried to find him in the aisles and nearby stores, without success; he was with a friend who had dragged him off (Colman didn’t know this) as they were late for a party and had only stopped to buy an apology gift. A couple of days later, the Philadelphian went on Craigslist looking for an iPod Touch, but he glanced at the Missed Connections section and saw a message: “I saw you outside of Walgreens in Berkeley…” He admits that he jumped out of his chair with excitement. He immediately wrote to the man, who was called Raúl, and they arranged a meeting at a bar in San Francisco. Twenty years have passed and they have hardly been apart since that first night, which they spent together and in which they saw that in the future, no matter what happened — including tantrums at the gym — they would go forward hand-in-hand.

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