After Colman Domingo graduated from university in Philadelphia, he moved to San Francisco to pursue acting on the advice of one of his tutors. It was the early ’90s and Domingo had recently come out to his family. “I went there at 21 years old, skinny and cute [with] a lot of energy,” he says now.
Drawn towards the bohemian lifestyle that artists lived out in the Bay Area, he grew his hair and got a job at The Kennel Club, a bar and alternative music venue that hosted the likes of Gil Scott-Heron and a pre-Nevermind Nirvana. He wanted to be a dancer. The bosses liked him. Could he work behind a bar, too? He lied and told them yes. Domingo’s co-workers taught him the tactics that led to tips: tight trousers, unbuttoned shirts, strong cocktails. Until then, his brother had been the one in the family who knew how to dress, but now he was starting to work out his own style playbook.
Every night Domingo would leave the club and move onto the next place with his cash in his back pocket. “We would go out after the bar and blow it,” he says. He took ecstasy (a long-retired habit; “I've got things to do”), and went to raves. “I remember one night I made a lot of money. The next day I bought a scooter and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to the nude beaches on the other side.”
Those years have remained important to Domingo for many reasons, not least a testament to the power of a great outfit to win people over. Three decades later, he’s still flexing that sense of style. You might have seen him in glamorous regalia – like the black custom Louis Vuitton suit with Nehru collar that he wore at the Globes last month. Often wearing tailoring which plays with proportion and in experimental shades, Domingo is a fixture on best-dressed lists as regularly as he appears on red carpets.
We are speaking in the midst of awards season, with Domingo nominated for Rustin at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Oscars. Answering our call, he’s a little more dressed down, in a lumberjack tartan shirt and a red baseball cap. Relaxed, you could say, or, as relaxed as you can be while in the hectic swirl of lunches, interviews, appearances on late-night television.
Now 54, Domingo has been doing this for over 30 years, though you’re likely to have only noticed him in the last five. Maybe it was for his role as a recovering addict in HBO’s Euphoria; or for playing a menacing pimp or civil rights activist in lauded arthouse movies Zola and Selma. Or maybe, it was his work in the Netflix biopic Rustin, in which he plays another civil rights trailblazer, Bayard Rustin. This year, Domingo earned his first Oscar nomination for that performance, becoming the first Afro-Latino man and the first gay Black man to be recognised in the Academy’s 96-year history. “I never thought that I was doing anything particularly special,” he tells me from his Los Angeles apartment.
Domingo is used to being informed of his history-making career. In 2018, at a college talk he conducted while in the middle of filming Fear the Walking Dead, a student raised his hand to ask him a question: Do you realise that you're doing something very unique in this industry? There was no one else like Domingo, the student claimed: a gay Black man working in Hollywood at the wattage he was. Domingo tilts his head, recalling his reaction. “I was struck that I didn't realise it.”
Part of Hollywood’s strange fixation with what we are rather than who we are, on using queerness as a qualifier to talk about an actor’s success, is something Colman Domingo has spent his career studiously ignoring. He never dreamed of being better within the confines of certain characteristics, but of being better at what he does full stop. “People constantly refer to Robert Downey Jr as an actor; they refer to Brad Pitt as an actor – but do they say, openly white?
“Why do I have to get all these monikers put on myself?” He lets out a little laugh. “You know,” he says, “I'm just Colman Domingo, the actor.”
This is not to say that Domingo does not understand the “hunger for representation”, but rather that, in order to succeed, he had to ignore the limitations others have tried to impose on him, and build the career he knew he deserved.
During those years in San Francisco, Domingo was figuring out who he was, as a person and an artist. His friend circle in the late ’90s was made up of queer, cultured types, such as Doug Holsclaw, the artistic director of the LGBTQ-led Theatre Rhinoceros. In 1998, Holsclaw, asked a still-green Domingo if he ever wanted to write something for the stage. With “$500 and a dream”, he started a theatre company, and his debut, Up Jumped Springtime, became the highest-grossing show the Theatre Rhinoceros had seen in 25 years.
“I feel like [the city] liberated me,” he says of those years. “You go there to really be an artist, because it's not about New York Times reviews. It's not about moving to Broadway. It was the genesis of my whole being.”
But Domingo did move onto Broadway, and New York’s theatre scene embraced him. He earned two Tony nominations (one for acting, another for writing) and, in London, an Olivier nomination too.
Annie Dorsen, who worked with Domingo on her 2006 play Passing Strange, told me that “[he] was always there to do the work and make it as good as it could be, but he also took real care of how everyone was doing in the room.”
Perhaps that’s why filmmakers ask him back, like Spike Lee (three times), Rustin’s George C Wolfe (twice), and Sam Levinson, whose casting of Domingo in Euphoria as Rue’s straight-talking confidant Ali earned him an Emmy in 2022. (Real Levinson heads will recall Domingo’s earlier turn in Assassination Nation.) Of course, it also exposed Domingo to his most captive and internet-literate audience yet, which matters greatly at a time when movie stars are made on TV.
The actors playing the kids of East Highland high school – among them Zendaya and Jacob Elordi – are creeping closer to their 30s with each year that passes. Domingo doesn't face this problem, and will be back for the show’s third season. The show has taken longer to return than its fans would have liked, partly because Levinson spent much of the last two years working with The Weeknd on their controversial and often critically maligned series The Idol.
There’s also a sense that Levinson may be waiting for the heat to die off: a 2022 article in The Daily Beast reported that Euphoria’s working conditions on night shoots were “hellish”, with some anonymous actors suggesting they breached SAG-AFTRA guidelines. Domingo has refuted that, saying: “There’s no one that’s going to mistreat you on the set of Euphoria. Sam Levinson is joyful, and collaborative, and could not be a bigger advocate for his actors.”
The reason for the delay, Domingo believes, is because Levinson is constantly responding to the culture. “[Sam is] a person who writes and rewrites and writes and rewrites again, because I think he's wrestling with what's important,” Domingo says. “He's responding immediately to what the ills of the world are. I know that the one thing I can tell you is that he's very much interested in the existential question of who we are right now. Our souls. That's what he wants to figure out with season three.”
Another potentially controversial project in the pipeline for Domingo is the forthcoming, estate-approved biopic of the singer Michael Jackson, directed by Antoine Fuqua. Domingo plays the singer’s late father, Joe, and is in the middle of filming at the moment. It’s not necessarily new ground for Domingo: he’s played real-life figures for much of his career, and in his fictional performances like Mister in 2023’s The Color Purple, he’s tackled men whose behaviour is seen as abusive.
The Jackson biopic, Domingo says, is “looking at the complex, complicated person that Michael Jackson is, [as well as] everyone else around him”. As for Joe – who MJ claimed emotionally and physically abused him as a child, he says “the world has a great opinion of him, and a lot of questions: Was he too tough? Was he mean? Did he abuse [his children]? I think I’ve been cast so I can find the humanity in him, and find out what makes him tick.”
It’s been revealed that the film will make note of the child sexual assault allegations that marred the final years of Michael Jackson’s life, but exactly how a film involving his family will frame it is yet to be seen. Still, Domingo explains that he didn’t bring his own thoughts on those allegations to the project. He believes that you can’t go into playing someone and bring your ideas of how you feel into the work. “You have to read the script and see what you’re trying to attempt to do. With any figure, if you focus on one beat of controversy, I think it diminishes a person’s whole life.
“I’ve played enough ‘villains’,” he says. “I have to try and find out why hurt people hurt people.”
He mentions the character of Mister: “He’s absolutely an abuser, but I don’t want to look at him how other people look at him; I want to figure out his interior life, and what made him do what he does. If we do that, we can find out what makes us more like him than unlike.”
Such is true of Bayard Rustin too. In his building of the character, Domingo made sure that the civil rights activist wasn’t deified for his greatness but shown as a man capable of being both brilliant and flawed at the same time. “He was thoughtful, but stubborn. Sometimes he was incredibly messy,” he says. Domingo read some of the film’s reviews after it premiered. (He refuses to believe he’s the only actor who does.) “I read the great ones, and then the not so great,” he says, “The thing I was curious about is when people were like, ‘Oh, why did we have to deal with his sex life?’”
In the film, Rustin is seen galvanising crowds to come together to march peacefully in Washington. It also sees him as an unreliable partner, and seductively coaxes a closeted married man out of his shell. “You don't want to deal with that,” Domingo says to those critics. “And what I love is that we do deal with it.”
After the Rustin awards run, after playing Joe Jackson, Domingo wants to turn his focus to a biopic of the jazz legend Nat King Cole he has written. He plans to direct and star in it, too. It will be the second time he’s delved into Cole’s life. One of his first works was Lights Out, a stage musical about the musician that Domingo wrote the script for. “It's very much a biopic for cinema,” he insists, adding that although the film is different from his musical, he considers the two projects “kissing cousins”. Dependent on securing funding, the film should start shooting in autumn. “I'm not the person that thinks I should do all of it,” he says, but with this project, “I know exactly what I'm trying to paint.”
There is someone grounding Domingo in the midst of all of this. A man he once met, or rather made eye contact with, in the aisles of a supermarket in California 19 years ago. Domingo first relayed the chance encounter with his now-husband Raul to GQ in 2021. More recently, after discussing it on The Graham Norton Show, it became a touching reminder to a generation fatigued by dating apps that fate could lead us to the right person. Raul runs Domingo’s production company with him, but is by choice inconspicuous in Domingo’s public life. They are, despite their meet-cute making for a viral moment, a dedicated and private couple.
“I just wanted to inspire people to get off an app and get out into the world,” Domingo says of the story’s social media resurgence. “To follow an impulse, and to be less cool. Our story has lasted for a long time – and it isn’t perfect, but it's pretty darn good, because we're always willing and trying to evolve with each other.”
His mother has been another grounding force for him at moments during his career. In 2014, Domingo auditioned for a bit part as a nightclub Maitre’d in Boardwalk Empire. Ultimately Domingo missed out on it because a researcher pointed out that he would be too dark-skinned for what that character would look like according to history. When his agent called with the news, he broke down in the gym as people looked on. Later, he collected himself, and the words his mother said years earlier echoed in his head: “Don’t complain about it. Do something about it.”
He changed his management team, and made it clear the kind of respect he deserved. “I'm not doing it that way any more,” he remembers thinking. “I'm going to value my time. If it’s a role that's similar to something I've done before, you can look at that. I’m gonna be too busy over here doing what makes sense to me.”
That realisation changed everything for him, and it has been paying off. “There are many actors who are incredibly gifted who never quite get to the point where their talents match their opportunities,” says director Barry Jenkins, who cast him in If Beale Street Could Talk. “Colman, particularly in this last six months, has got to a place where I don't think that's an issue. It doesn't happen for everybody, but I'm damn glad that he manifested it for himself.”
Nowadays, Domingo doesn’t audition. He’s an offer-only guy. “Me and this business had to come to Jesus,” he says. “When you feel like an old dog in this industry, you're like, you know what? I earned it.”
Styled by Wayman + Micah