Colman Domingo On Career Versatility And Keeping His Plate Full Between ‘Rustin’ And ‘The Color Purple’; “I Feel Like I Should Be Able To Play Fabulous And Very Butch”

After spending 30-plus years honing his craft for stage and screen, Colman Domingo is more than ready for his close-up. Considering the actor’s versatile resume, which includes memorable performances in Selma, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fear the Walking Dead, or his Emmy-winning role on Euphoria and a handful of Tony nominations, it’s bewildering that his recent portrayal of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, in Netflix’s Rustin, marks his first leading role and Golden Globe nomination. Also, this year, Domingo features in another highly acclaimed film, The Color Purple, where he plays the dastardly Mister.

Here, the actor reflects on his career and playing Black icons.

DEADLINE: With five films under your belt this year alone, it feels like the year of Colman Domingo. But you’ve been creative in front of and behind the camera as a writer, director, actor and producer for over three decades.

DOMINGO: I started in this industry as a multi-hyphenate, just trying to create work in San Francisco many years ago in the early ’90s. I took some classes, studied, and started getting cast in things, and my whole career was just about learning while I was in the rooms as a craftsman. I didn’t go to graduate school for acting. I learned everything by being in rooms and watching rehearsals I wasn’t even called for because I was learning. I was watching relationships between directors, actors, playwrights and producers, you name it. And I think that’s been my strength as I look back at my career, it was my conservatory. 

Going to San Francisco to be an actor turned me into this multi-hyphenate artist, where I then started creating because I felt like I had liberty to create. I was also surrounded by my friends, who were also these multi-hyphenates, like my friend Sean San José, who runs the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, or Margo Hall, an actor-director who runs Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. These are my comrades, so we grew up together in a way, in the theater and film and television. We’re feeling like we just do what we need to do, what our skills lend for whatever production that is. That’s why my career is so varied in theater, film and television, directing, producing and singing. I’ve been doing that for years. But now it’s with brighter lights around it. But I still feel like it’s the origin of me being a curious artist in San Francisco many years ago on these very small stages, feeling the liberty to just create.

DEADLINE: When did you start to take yourself more seriously as a creative? 

DOMINGO: I think I took myself seriously before anyone else did. So, I think it would go back to my origins of being in my early 20s in San Francisco, where—I don’t even know where this comes from—but I did own my power early on. I did not let this industry dictate what I could or could not play or perform or what spaces I could be in. I just did what was in front of me. And I think that’s something that I instinctively knew, and it always goes back to your family in some way and how you’re set up in the world. I feel like I was loved and told I had a purpose and joy, and my parents just wanted me to be happy and do whatever it was… Because they’re working-class folks who, my stepfather sanded hardwood floors, and my mother worked at customer service in the bank, and she also did day’s work, housekeeping work.

And, if anything, they instilled values in me, just saying, “Hey, be purposeful with what you do.” And their dream for me was just to be happy and not have a job, but in whatever way they were saying it, don’t just have a job. Do something that makes you feel useful. And there’s a line in Rustin that talks about that towards the end where it says, “Have you made yourself useful today?” So, in a way, I think it may be a way that I didn’t even understand early on that was part of my practice of being useful as an artist and owning my power at the same time. So that was early on because I was starting theater companies when I was in my early 20s. I had no access or anything…but listen, I’m from West Philly. I know how to hustle and bargain.

I would get a theater to host my production, but I would give them a percentage of the box office but let me have free will to do what I wanted. I was already thinking as a creative producer, so I was producing since I was in my early 20s, and I was always directing my friend’s work, whether we fall back, and I act, and they direct, or I direct, and they write. I worked with a group of artists who always did that for each other, and we’re still like that in each other’s lives. So, I think that’s always been my approach to this industry.

And I think that that’s always told me that I had a voice, and I had a place in it, even at times when it was challenged, I think like Rustin in a way where it was challenged, you’re like, is there a space for me? Is there a place for my voice and what I want? I’ve had highs and lows in my career, like anybody else. And I had moments where I thought, this isn’t for me, but I always made agreements where it’s like I wasn’t going to be defeated. I was just going to go gently into that dark night and do something else. That’s why people call me and be like, “You’ve got five, six, seven, eleven jobs,” and I’m like, “Yes, I do.” I was in the show Fear the Walking Dead for eight seasons, but I was still always working in the off-season. My fellow actors weren’t in many ways, but I was like, I had a directing job set up, another show set up, a guest star spot set up, and this, that, and the other. I know what it’s like not to have, but I’m going to make sure that I have and that the plate is full.

DEADLINE: In Rustin, there’s the powerful line, “On the day I was born Black, I was also born homosexual.” Tying this into what you’ve personally addressed in the media regarding your own experience playing both straight and gay roles as an openly gay Black man, what has been your experience like navigating this space? Have you ever experienced pushback?

DOMINGO: I think from the very beginning, I’ve always been open in my career, but it wasn’t as if I was letting the fact that I was openly gay dictate the roles that I was doing. I’m just not that person. I feel like, yeah, I’m a dude who’s got ideas and thoughts and dreams and aspirations like anybody else, and you have a heteronormative male [role to fill]. And I feel like I never put limitations on myself, but I don’t walk into the room bringing in all my relationships and personal life.

As an actor, I want the person to see me as someone who can play a myriad of things. And I think if there was ever any pushback, if anyone knew something about me and thought, ‘Well, I don’t know if he can really go to those places,’ I didn’t know. But I felt like I liberated myself from that sort of criticism or power or anything early on in my career. For an actor to play Bayard Rustin and Mister in The Color Purple simultaneously shows what I always believed my career could be. I don’t think I’ve had any pushback. If I have, I wasn’t aware of it because I’ve been too busy creating my own work and creating my own lane in many ways, which is why I go between being a playwright, screenwriter, singer, dancer, and actor. I always have somewhere to go and create.

I will say this, there was one time a close colleague of mine questioned me in a way that really challenged what I thought that they thought about me because I was lobbying for a role, and the role was for some straight dude in some play. And they actually asked me, “Well, could you play straight?” It was wild to me. And I thought, ‘Wait, what?’ Because the only thing that this person knew was something that I was in, that I had the power to create that had a queer [person] at the center. And I thought, ‘Wow, but you didn’t look at the rest of my work, the body of my work, who I am, or how I’m supposed to stretch as an actor.’ That person has deeply apologized since then because they realized their narrow vision. I don’t know if I’m masked presenting or not, but I think I’m nerd presenting [laughs].  I feel like I should be able to play fabulous, and I should be able to play very butch.

DEADLINE: Exactly. Let’s get into these two very different roles you’ve played this year. First, Rustin. How did you work with George C. Wolfe and writers Dustin Lance Black and Julian Breece to bring this Civil Rights icon to life? 

DOMINGO: We worked in concert in a very extraordinary way—deep conversations between George and I. Once the script was delivered from Julian and Dustin, they let us wrestle with it and take it over, which was great. So, it was more between me and George, and we had rehearsals every single day for two weeks leading up to filming. George and I would have these great conversations about the potency of this experience of Rustin and what it requires. And it required a sense of extraordinary intelligence and wit and humanity and vulnerability. We wanted to create a platform for one of our personal heroes. 

It’s such an extraordinary opportunity, and I don’t want to use the phrase “Trying to get it right”, but you just want to be able to lend everything that you could to craft a very complex human being who had so much spirit and so much drive and so much intelligence and purpose and was committed to changing America. It’s not an opportunity given every day, especially for me as an actor. How many people get the opportunity to play one of their heroes? It doesn’t happen often. So, I knew I wanted to give everything I could, so I prepped for five months for this work. I prepped on my own and went to the Smithsonian for African American history and the Civil Rights Museums in Memphis and Atlanta, the one that George Wolfe curated. I wanted to give the role everything I could. 

I feel like this is one of those films that, if I do nothing else, I want to give everything in my soul to lead this film to bring humanity and complexity to this American hero. This is the opportunity, 32 years in the making, so you want to leave it all on the floor, leave nothing behind. And I know I can see the work, and I know there’s nothing I left behind. Everyone from the writers to directors, camera operators and all departments had that mission. So, it feels really special in that way.

DEADLINE: As for Mister in The Color Purple, was there a key physicality that helped you unlock your portrayal that differed from the Broadway and Danny Glover adaptations? 

DOMINGO: The first thing I had to do was divorce myself from any idea of Mister that I’d seen or experienced. I’ve watched the [1985] film probably 100 times in my life. I’ve seen both versions of the Broadway musical. So, I basically picked up the book and had to go to the source material, and then when I’m reading, find how Mister lives in my imagination, how he moves through spaces. And then also to take in the script that Marcus Gardley gave us, which is to look at the arc of that script because he made some adjustments to the character to build an arc for Mister’s redemption. I had to examine that, and I needed to find out how he lived in me. And I think as I was exploring him, he lived in a unique way that Oprah even says. She’s looked at me and said, “Oh, Mister is sexy.”

But I thought of him as being a virile human being who wanted to be a blues singer and play the banjo. So that’s the way he was leading and the way he was sneaking through the world. He was trying to be his own man, even with his style and how he presented himself. I thought even just taking the fact that he called himself Mister and wanted everyone else to call him Mister, which says a lot about character. His name is Albert, but he’s like, “Call me Mister. I’m demanding my own reverence”, which I thought was fascinating. So, I put that into his body and how he moves through spaces.

He’s a bit more of a challenge because I know people who’ve been in horrific abusive relationships and the question of why people stay in them [is ever present], even when you get to the base level of why, and some say, “Well, I was attracted to them.” So, I wanted to make that challenge of why Celie doesn’t cut his throat sooner stronger. There’s something seductive, something interesting. He’s got charm. So, I put that all into his body and even made vocal changes so that it’s challenging for the audience. Because I come from theater, I built a character from the ground up. Mister had a higher pitched voice that had more light and joy, but by the time he’s in his darkest spaces, it’s gravelly and husky and filled with tobacco because he had a tobacco farm.

I crafted him to be the opposite of Bayard Rustin, who, in recordings, has a higher pitched voice than mine and it’s reedier. I needed to find a way to use it dramatically for great effect, whether he’s trying to gain the room when he’s with the men from the NAACP or when he’s feeling smaller and how his body contorts and everything feels smaller in spaces. I’m also a physical actor. I’m akin to Lucille Ball and Madeline Kahn. But the actors I’ve always admired, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Christian Bale, the people who fully inhabit, and then they recede. You give everything you can to a character, and then you pull yourself back and let them present themselves in their operating systems, so Mister and Bayard Rustin live very differently in my body.

DEADLINE: Having embodied these two roles close together, how did you manage to put them on and take them off? 

DOMINGO: There’s always a lot of questions about process with actors. I think that characters always stay within you. I know that when I, in particular, listened to a scene from Rustin, my body, my emotions, I could feel that day and what I was experiencing and had to process. But on the day-to-day, I know how to take it off. I think it’s healthy for actors to know how to take it off. Especially when you’re handling trauma, going to some deeper, darker places, you need to know how to get back to zero so you can fuel up and go again. I make sure I set myself up with, depending on what I need. I think with both Rustin and The Color Purple, I needed light when I went home.

So, whatever apartments or houses I had, I needed light and flowers every week. I need to take care of myself so I can take care of others because I think that’s important. I’m not one of those actors who feels like if I’m in this traumatic space, I’m going to carry that through, and no one can speak to me because I’m in this dark place. I may need to stay closer to the character on the day, but I’m always a part of who I am. I always want to be a collaborator filled with joy, grace and love. So, I don’t let the darkness overshadow and just lean into the production. I don’t think that’s healthy and doesn’t give a healthy environment, so I know how to shake it off.

DEADLINE: Throughout your career, you’ve often worked with younger, contemporary actors. In The Color Purple, you have a serious position lording over Phylicia Pearl Mpasi (young Celie) and Halle Bailey (young Nettie) … can you talk to me about how you approach working with these younger actors and your co-stars in this film? Do you mentor them? 

DOMINGO: I absolutely mentor them. I think it’s important for me to look after them but welcome them into their own process. So, for me, I’m not trying to tell them what to do in any way, shape, or form. I’m open to seeing how they experience this, but also I know that they’re watching. They’re watching the way I run a set. They’re watching how I deal with wardrobe or ADs [assistant directors] or directors. They’re watching me. So I know that that’s also an added responsibility. I loved working with those two young women. I had to establish a sense of trust with them because I know that they have to go to some really tricky places, especially as young women.

One, [my character] sexually abused both of them in the film, and you got to establish it as a man in this industry. As someone, as much as a feminist as I am, I need to make sure that I had every ounce of love and respect and trust with them to make sure I looked after them after every take, because that’s what it required. I don’t want to trigger them or make them feel some kind of way about themselves or harm to their bodies or what they may even experience out in the world of being objectified or anything like that. I wanted to create a safe space so we can lend what we need to lend to these characters, and I think that’s what we did. I love working with Phylicia and with Halle. They’re my little sisters.

DEADLINE: We’ve got to talk about the “Until you do right by me” scene in the film involving you, Danielle Brooks and Fantasia Barrino. Celie is laying into Mister and Sofia is gloating in the mess. Walk me through that day of filming. 

DOMINGO: It was fun, yet arduous. We shot that scene at least five times because we were shooting during COVID. And so, every so often, it’s a big scene, somebody’s going down, somebody went down, so we got to go back to it. It’s a scene filled with superstars as well. You have her, you have Jon Batiste… So, how can we get them all in the room to still get that effect? At times, we used a few people’s doubles to do the scene, but we had to go at that scene five different times and recall and be open and available each time.

That was a great scene to do. I love that scene because it’s our perspective on it, too. We all remember that scene so very well. But playing off of Danielle and Taraji [P. Henson], Fantasia was just fantastic. And even the ending of the scene with me and Louis Gossett Jr. just staring at each other. You’re watching generational trauma pass through each other, and then my son Harpo is trying to break it as he leaves the room as well. So, for me, there’s so much conversation happening all around that table, and it is a horrific Easter Sunday, to say the least. I also wanted to show something that may not have been shown before, but a bit of vulnerability in Mister when Celie leaves, and he’s using his words as an attack because he realizes he needs her. You know what I mean? I think he realizes in the moment that he needs her and that she looks after him, and she’s a bit of softness for him, even though he doesn’t have language to be soft or caring or loving. So, it’s a whole examination of what he’s been dealt from his father and what he’s experiencing now by these women liberating themselves at this table. It’s an awesome scene. I loved doing it.

DEADLINE: Between both The Color Purple and Rustin, was there a scene that resonated with you after seeing the completed film that, perhaps while filming, you didn’t think would translate well on screen? 

DOMINGO: It does, but I tell you, with The Color Purple, there was a scene that I hoped would be impactful, and it’s playing the way we felt that it could, which is the scene when I’m coming out of the Juke drunk off my butt. And I finally say to my son, Harpo, to Corey Hawkins, “I’m proud of you for making the Juke joint. I didn’t know would be good”, or something like that. And then he just lays his head on Corey’s chest. We discovered that in rehearsal because it’s not written that way. It’s written that he’s just saying, “I’m proud of what you did,” he walks off. But I thought, here’s an opportunity for a possibility of what could have meant tenderness being a father and son. But because Mister is so out of his mind in that moment, he’s not even aware that he lays his head on his son’s chest. And in rehearsal, it catches my throat every time I think about it. I heard Corey just say, “Are you all right, Pop?” And it lands on him, makes him vulnerable, then he looks up and dismisses it.

He can’t go there. I wonder, if Mister actually went there, how he would fall apart. You know what I mean? So, he keeps going with the trauma because that’s all he knows. He’s walking around with it. So, for me, that scene is playing in an extraordinary way, the way I hoped that it could because I think that’s a step in the right direction towards Mister’s redemption at the end. And with Rustin, I would say there’s a scene with Audra McDonald where she’s telling me to go get my friend back. I didn’t know that that was the way that the scene was going to go. I didn’t know that I would be emotionally unlocked in that way because Bayard’s been carrying all this deep hurt and pain about his friendship with Martin. Then, it was through Audra’s performance and the way she was pinpointing coming at me that I understood the character enough that it helped release that pain.

DEADLINE: What color or symbol would you say represents your spirit at this time in your career? 

DOMINGO: If anyone’s noticed, I’ve worn a lot of white on red carpets because I feel like I wanted to be the light in the room. I feel like we’re living in dark times, and I think I know what I represent as an artist and a human being. And I’m very conscious of that, of what my intention is, what my purpose is. And so, I wear a lot of white because I feel like that’s something we need, and that’s why I wear white, and it’s tailored and fit and pink things that people are like… It makes people feel like the light, too. So, I think that’s dope. I’m having such an extraordinary time in my career, and I do know that it’s a moment. We don’t know if we ever get these moments, but I know I can recognize it.

I’m not unaware of it. Because I walk into rooms and there’s light in people’s eyes for me, and people who want for me, people who are happy that I populate these spaces, and I don’t want to let them down. You know what I mean? I want to come with as much love, grace, joy, and a sense of play as I did when I first started in San Francisco many years ago. And I still want to have that sense of play and joy even in this incredible storm of goodness and accolades and mentions. I still want to feel like I’m just starting out.