Philadelphia-born Domingo steps into his latest role as Divine G in Sing Sing with the same integrity and depth he’s brought to every performance, from his unforgettable turn as Ali in Euphoria to portraying Bayard Rustin. Here, he reflects on his journey, the responsibility of storytelling and the moral compass that guides his work
Colman Domingo says West Philly like it’s the only option for his origin story, balling his face up at the idea he might have hailed from anywhere else. When we speak on Zoom, I’m in his hometown and he’s at the Chelsea Hotel. He rocks an oversized black tee across the screen from me, thick cotton draping down past his elbows as I prepare to mind his business. He likes the beauty of black and gold on brown skin, and while our near-matching fits are accidental, the fact of Philly as a particular kind of provenance is not. The star of such roles as Victor Strand in Fear the Walking Dead and famously mean Mister in The Color Purple reminisces on his night prior at a Ralph Lauren show in the Hamptons. “I’d never been so moved at a fashion show,” he says. We both recall the many Black kids from way back, clawing their way into self-possessed style through the damn-near attainable tutelage of Ralph Lauren. And from this aspirational moment, he reflects on his own journey – one marked by scrupulous ethics and perennial labour – and how he’s now basking in the glow of long-overdue recognition.
He wasn’t always first on the call sheet, but his long-standing dedication as Equity Deputy on set served him well towards playing a man like Bayard Rustin with reverie. More than three decades from when he began, Domingo is now an over-50 baddie, thanks especially to his role as Ali in Euphoria, and set to star in everything from Netflix’s The Madness – as the wrongfully accused media pundit Muncie Daniels – to Joe Jackson in the Michael biopic next year.
But to be clear, Domingo didn’t wake up like this. He was the doted-upon namesake of a father from Belize, and a mother who made Domingo feel his name could have just as easily been Somebody Loved. What they lacked in the grandeur of material resources, they made up for with tireless devotion to their children who, in turn, continue to wash each other down with affection. Picture Domingo’s older sister, Ave, whooping ass down the street all summer long in defence of his softness, and how the retention of that tenderness has allowed him to become the man and actor we see today, fawning over his now-grown, six-foot-four younger brother Phil, in deeply abiding love with his husband Raúl, and setting new standards for the warmth of other men in the theatre. “‘Cause I had a hood sister,” he says, laughing. And praise be to all the no-nonsense-on-my-kin older sisters of too-soft Black boys the world over who, without such a stalwart figure, might have otherwise turned to stone as gargoyles in the bright light of summertime.
I understood immediately how important his sister was in his life; you could feel Domingo’s inner child, Jay, they called him, reaching out to hold her, to be beheld by her. “And she’s great,” he went on. “Calmed down now and has a family.” Domingo’s big brother, Rick, was no slouch either, scooping up young Jay’s heartbreaks and public fits, and informing him and whoever else that such immense emotion had warrant. And so, Domingo was able to liberate himself from the worst kind of masculine expectation before it was too late.
This is to say he was a shy boy a year behind Will Smith at Overbrook High and with much less money. “I went to the Overbrook where you either caught the bus, or you drove your parents’ BMW,” he recalls with the clarity of what we might call working-class memory. Contrary to the American mythos, the rarity, to this very day, with which such a person might change class positions or enter the discursive field of art should be lost on no one; nor should the formal labours, luck or love that such a feat demands, be passed off as inevitability. Domingo had to find art on his own, walking to the University of Pennsylvania from his family home on 52nd and Chancellor in the pre-metal detector days when anyone could peruse the stacks in the library; he’d even browse the shelves at queer bookstores like Giovanni’s Room in search of himself, before anyone dreamt of his role as Mr. Rivers in If Beale Street Could Talk. And though he knew nothing of who James Baldwin was back then, his most beloved text from that archive would soon become the 1964 collection of essays, Nothing Personal.
When I’d asked him earlier whether he was exposed to art in high school, Domingo laughed with a “no” and leaned most easily into painters he’d discovered on his own like Jacob Lawrence and Henri Matisse, or photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus. He resists telling the too-easy story, that a teacher handed him transformation, or that he was drowning since birth in the awe-inspiring prominence of any particular aesthetic tradition. Domingo’s mother loved soul music, of course, though she also encouraged in him an extension of seeing that went beyond his immediate surroundings, which gave him the space for curiosity regarding classical. The carefulness of his self-narration befits that of a serious writer. And a writer he would be. Refusing roles such as, say, “Drug Dealer #2” as often as he was conscripted to them, Domingo instead has been trying to write the roles he wanted to play since his early 20s. He has that never-scared-of-work attitude and swagger you see in lots of folks from Philly, that “if you’re going to do anything you damn sure better do it well” mode of being – a dedicated, though never fetishised, hustle, that quintessential Black role of making magic in the background of American history since its inception. He’s worked in the music department at Barnes & Noble on Walnut, woken up at 4am for years as a baker’s assistant, put to work some manner of his photojournalism studies at Temple to build a clientele for headshots that included De’Adre Aziza, and snapped photos backstage at Our Little Miss pageants. But his favourite job, the one he revels in for helping him become a reformed introvert, was bartending.
Most recently, though, Domingo does his thing as Divine G in Sing Sing, next to his day-one brother from another mother during his San Francisco theatre days, Sean San José, who’s playing his friend Mike Mike, and a cast of formerly incarcerated actors who participated in Katherine Vockins’ Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme. The problem with prison arts programmes is how they remind you, constantly, of the enduring despotism of our punishment-only moral economy, while also drafting our hearts into the service of possibility on a lower frequency, in observing first-hand the fecundity of thought and feeling in subjects otherwise unspeakable to the bourgeois art world. Grotesque displays of power, warranting what can be read and said or how, and the wide-eyed hindsight whispering in your ear: what if these men would have found art sooner? Rather than asking after the immense structural barriers preventing anyone from doing so or the standard set of prescribed culpability plaguing damn near everyone who has ever been imprisoned. The double-edged tragedy of witnessing transformation through true aesthetic education and play that should exist everywhere, sustained within a place that shouldn’t exist at all.
Domingo as Divine G is innocent, as the story goes, but this disinterests the state. The film’s most fascinating shots surround the micro-transactions embedded in looks and gesture, the tightening or otherwise unravelling of formerly stiff comportments, the intimacy between these men. It is the film’s thematic heartbeat, dramatised through movement exercises, ad-libbed dancing between sequences, and deliberate training in mindfulness – memory work. Domingo, and each and every man cast as themselves, transforms the expectant into the sublime. Amongst the most memorable scenes in Sing Sing is one of mutual recognition between would-be enemies. Divine G, a de facto leader in the RTA program, pulls aside a newcomer, a more wayward member, Divine Eye, to talk through his frustrations. Divine Eye is, of course, suspicious of being pulled aside by Divine G into what the former describes as a dark corner, which is in no way a dark corner. But we know what he means in the mind. We have seen or been implicated in such scenes before. We’re looking over both men’s shoulders, and as the pace of discourse and Eye’s hands pick up, the camera bounces back and forth faster, as if inching towards the time-honoured tradition of fisticuffs, or worse.
Divine Eye tells G all manner of shit he definitely ain’t here for, until G’s like, “I know you got a knife in your waistband.”
“Of course,” Eye says. And the two men’s faces feel like they might touch. Divine G switches pace, desperate to maintain the sanctity of the interaction, a symbol of the RTA programme as a whole.
Eye is not at all becalmed by Divine G and instead says what we feel: “you don’t get to tell me what to do in no fuckin’ prison. And don’t bring me in no dark corners no more, this shit make a nigga nervous.”
And I realised then, that the one word I’m so endeared towards had been absent the entire film. “We don’t use nigga in here,” Divine G says. “We use beloved. You feel me on that?”
Divine Eye, full of rage, stares at G for a few seconds, just a beat or two too long, before walking away. The camera pans around Divine G’s face, sullen, but poised, light shifting behind the chain-link fence to a blurry outside, and just then Domingo lets out the deep breath he’d been holding with the viewer, for the viewer, the whole time. Whew.
“And you can see the word working on him,” Domingo says to me on Zoom. He’d asked the director to extend that very moment and to linger on the word: beloved. It’s a quest for mutual recognition you might find stifled by all manner of state power, but one in which two men too often denied that vital transformation of the flesh are granted on screen just this once.
The scene is beautiful, which is what Domingo tells me to write – “something beautiful.” We’re reminded how well the film plays with the counterweights of tragedy and humour more broadly. It’s also funny how it’s juxtaposed with Domingo’s home life. Him floating butt naked in the pool; floating, not swimming, to be clear. Him in Carhartt and Home Depot swag on a ladder attending the overgrown bougainvilleas. Colman the cook, driving back from the farmer’s market to dream up a spin on French cuisine which, in his ease of manner, reminds me of the quietly delicious food pornography in A Taste of Things. Picture Domingo’s face pressed against the glass of his screen door staring down an ostentatious raccoon who may or may not have been party to the obliteration of his old vegetable garden, now survived by the lavender, sage and those California drought-resistant cacti. He has an enduring wish for the outdoors and a curiosity about the inner lives of things, a set of daily practices for the mind, body and soul, and a desire – shared with my daughter, who marches in from school toward the end of our conversation – to one day own a horse.
“Hey you!” he says to her, sweetly.
I ask Domingo how he feels to be on the receiving end of such well-earned praise, and he pauses for a beat. “I’m in awe, man, every day,” he says. And this seems different than the usual turn to perfunctory gratitude that stars make; you could feel the distance from where he started pouring out at the release of his posture. And in this, I thought all too easily for the first time, we are too. In awe that is, beholding the work, and letting it work on us, together.
Photography John Edmonds
Styling Mitchell Belk
Production Hen’s Tooth Productions
Groomer Jessica Smalls
Set design Jesse Kaufmann
This article is taken from Port issue 35. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
