“He talks about the light, about our experiences as African Americans.” Colman Domingo is more soft-spoken than I expected, and maybe more whimsical. As he paraphrases James Baldwin, we’re sitting in what feels like a secret ballroom, tucked away behind the bar at downtown L .A .’s Soho Warehouse—he’d pushed through the closed doors winking impishly, like a child at the mouth of his hiding place. Though he never says it outright, I get the sense early on in our conversation that family is core to Domingo’s personal code—the poetry of family: the family that created him, the family he creates, the family bond of Blackness (descendants of Baldwin, all), and the human family, each intimately and distinctly interwoven. I lean in close or risk missing his susurrations.
“We emptied out oceans with a homemade spoon and learned to swim, and if love was in Hong Kong’... What was it?” He looks to the side, scanning his memory, two cherry-red ball studs beaming from his earlobes. “Something like, ‘If love was in Hong Kong, we’d learn how to fly.’ ”
His own family story starts in West Philadelphia on the brink of the ‘70s, when soul and funk music were reaching a fever pitch and disco was just around the corner (he recalls his childhood home as a “bump and hustle palace,” always filled with the sounds of the Temptations, Aretha Franklin, and Switch, to name a few). Though his own father (a Central American native and, according to Domingo’s mother, “a no-good lowlife”) was largely absent, his mother and stepfather created a safe haven for Domingo and his siblings. Safe even for a shy, closeted, self-described nerd. “I didn’t know how to be charming or funny or interesting,” he remembers. “I wasn’t cool at all.”
His introverted nature drove him to the world of books and writing: first at Philadelphia’s Barnes & Noble bookstore, where he worked when he was 17 (“I used to take care of the self-help section—that’ll tell you a lot about me,” Domingo says, laughing), and later as a journalism student at Temple University. Researching and writing satiated his curiosity for the human experience, while he was wholly avoiding the human experience. “I felt socially inadequate, but I loved observing from the sidelines and telling stories.” It was a blueprint for Domingo’s journey, a barebones sketch of the landscape he’d later embellish. “A journalist and an actor aren’t far off,” he says. “Both are trying to document the human condition.”
At the behest of his mother, who thought he should take at least one class purely for fun, Domingo signed up for the school’s intro to acting course. “I knew it would help me tap into my feelings and be more verbal, more like the people I admired.” He couldn’t have known the impact of that single decision to veer off course. But even today, he still carries those earliest professional inclinations. “I love the research aspect of what I do,” Domingo tells me. “I love getting to know my subjects—anything I’m curious about, I research. That’s my journalistic nature at heart.”
As any journalist can tell you, cataloging human nature can be a painful endeavor, and much of Domingo’s work reflects that. His CV boasts some of the most poignant cinematic works to date: Steven Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln, chronicling the arduous journey toward slave emancipation during America’s grisly Civil War; Selma, Ava DuVernay’s 2014 Martin Luther King Jr. biopic (Domingo takes on the role of Ralph Abernathy, MLK’s best friend and advisor); If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’ gut-wrenching 2018 film adaptation of James Baldwin’s book by the same name, which follows a young Black couple as they battle the American prison system; and Candyman, the 2021 horror film directed by Nia DaCosta and cowritten by Jordan Peele, who has almost singlehandedly reinvented the genre in recent years. In it, Domingo plays a longtime resident of Chicago’s newly gentrified Cabrini-Green housing project, William Burke.
“Jordan Peele wrote that role for me after we had a long meeting about what was important to us about art, about life, about being Black, you name it,” Domingo says. Art, life, and Blackness are central to the film. In it, Anthony McCoy, a Black painter (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), explores the infamous Candyman legend—the story of the hook-handed Cabrini-Green resident who was violently murdered by police under suspicion of hurting a little white girl. Whereas nearly all horror films pit their proantagonists against a singular psycho-path, Candyman examines the role of the villain as a shadow archetype. Rather than depict its serial killer as a bloodthirsty butcher, the Candyman (whose terrifying presence can be conjured by repeating his moniker in a mirror three times) embodies the collective rage, hopelessness, and anguish of the people of Cabrini-Green, both past and present. He holds the trauma of a group whose history is being categorically wiped out to make room for a Starbucks.
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Burke, Domingo’s character, is critical to the storyline. In the final stretch of the movie (spoiler alert), he recreates the Candyman in a bone-chilling plot twist, brutally chopping Anthony McCoy’s hand off and stabbing the stump with a hook. On the surface, it looks like glorified gore, but the message was anything but arbitrary. “Jordan and Nia were examining the fact that you can’t cherry-pick,” Domingo says. “You can’t just eviscerate a people, a community, without knowing all that it is.” Burke’s role, in other words, is not to enact senseless violence; it’s to archive an age of senseless violence. “Burke internalizes their history,” Domingo explains. “He says, ‘I’ve got to make sure you understand what happened to us. I’m the holder of this trauma.’”
For Domingo, there was something essential in this exploration, something that reached beyond the projects of Chicago and hit the core of the American experience. “We don’t acknowledge what’s happened in this country, we don’t acknowledge that this is Native American land, we don’t acknowledge the horrors of slavery.” Though Burke might be seen as the film’s antihero, to Domingo, his actions encompass a critical catharsis. “We have to look honestly at what happens in these places if we want to get healthier—that’s what Burke teaches us.”
If Burke represents a sidelong way of meeting needs, it might be because the Black American experience requires it. “We couldn’t go by the book,” Domingo says, “because the book wasn’t made for us.” It’s an idea that serves as the backdrop to both A Boy and His Soul, Domingo’s one-man autobiographical play that premiered Off-Broadway, and New Moon, the subsequent surrealist animated short that was adapted from a segment of the show’s screenplay. Each one examines the heartbreak of dreams deferred in the Black community, but also the circuitous ways Black people have navigated the American landscape in order to realize their dreams.
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In particular, New Moon pulls focus on a memory of Domingo's carries of his mother, Edie. They sit outside on a warm summer evening under a new moon, and Aretha Franklin is crooning from a transistor radio. Edie cups her hands and lifts them overhead, asking a dark sky to fill them with the joy and success she longs for, that she tells her son is always achievable. “My mother poured into me the dreams and wishes she had for herself but didn’t have access to,” Domingo says. “She had never been to the opera or the theater, but she knew that that was possible for me.” It wasn’t solely a playful act, or a distraction from life’s disappointments; it was the paving of an alternate path forward. “That’s what we’ve been doing for generations,” Domingo says. “That’s part of our survival.”
New Moon and A Boy and His Soul aren’t the only times Domingo has drawn from his family for inspiration. In Euphoria—HBO’s massive 2019 dramatic hit series starring Zendaya as Rue, a teen struggling with addiction, sexual identity, and family conflict—Domingo plays Ali, Rue’s Narcotics Anonymous sponsor. The show itself is a masterful cacophony of family trauma, maniacal violence, sexual taboo, raging desire, and mind-altering sub-stances of every variety. In the whirlwind, Ali’s is maybe the only sobering presence. Four episodes into the first season, he sits with Rue in a diner while she waxes poetic on teen existentialism. “Rue—Rue—Rue,” he interjects, “I don’t give a shit. Why’d you call me?”
Despite Euphoria’s harrowing and heady ethos, Domingo—who won an Emmy for the role—plays the part utterly without sentimentality. Line after line, he delivers an honesty so sharp it cuts through the seemingly impenetrable delir - ium of Rue’s addiction. That kind of earnestness was one Domingo witnessed early in his own life, right at home. “Ali has a lot of my stepfather’s qualities,” he tells me. “Clarence, my stepfather, was very much about hard discipline and being account able for our actions—he demanded we do chores, do our homework, get our education. This from a man who was a blue-collar worker, who sanded hardwood floors and had a seventh-grade education.”
At the intersection of Ali and Clarence lies a heroism that Domingo sees as a kind of backbone of Black masculinity. “Ali is one of these brothers who’s got an ordinary job, has a simple life—he’s not flashy,” Domingo says. “But he’s heroic because he can see promise in other people that he may not be able to see in himself.” Though it makes Ali important, it doesn’t make him singular. Many of the men Domingo grew up around found purpose in exactly the kind of guidance Ali gives Rue. “They made a difference talking to young people by saying, ‘Y’all, don’t step in that. I’ve stepped in it before. Do better than me.’ ”
Throughout his life, Domingo has looked to his elders for guidance—particularly his parents. When his mother passed in 2006, the day after he auditioned for the Off-Broadway musical Passing Strange, it left a tremendous hole in his heart. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with all this love—I had been so connected to this human, and suddenly she was gone.” That moment marked a pivotal time, a time when Domingo would have to choose where to find meaning in his own life. Luckily, a dear friend was there to steer him. “She said, ‘You’re going to put your love into everything you do and everyone you touch,’ and that’s exactly what I did. That’s how I overcame my grief.”
In a miraculous turn of synchronicity, Domingo got the part in Passing Strange, a play centered on a young boy who loses his mother. Beyond being a cathartic outlet, or even a surreal manifestation of art imitating life, Passing Strange was a form of resuscitation. “My art was my life vest. It was the thing I held onto to navigate trepidatious grief, to give voice to what that is and to be able to be in it.” It was also a turning point that revealed Domingo’s spiritual relationship to his work—a symbiotic pulse. “The art you’re seeking is also seeking you,” Domingo says, his eyes resolute. “That’s what I realized.”
Creating such a profound connection to his craft changed him. Though he did win an Obie for his role in it, Domingo let go of the need for accolades, awards, and glowing reviews after Passing Strange. Nothing surpassed the feeling of leaving a piece of himself in the work. “I could really not give a fuck anymore,” he remembers. “Me and my art got even more married, more raw. My soul was in it.” It also permanently changed the projects he was attracted to. Tired stories, versions of roles he’d already taken on—those were out. “If I know it’s not going to change me or change the world a little bit, I’m not doing it.”
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It was exactly that energy that pulled Domingo toward the role of X, a real-life, volatile pimp with a distress-triggered Nigerian accent in Janicza Bravo’s 2020 indie flick, Zola. The movie, based on A’Ziah King’s viral tweet-storm from 2015, takes on a nearly true story of sex trafficking, pimp culture, and violence. “All things I have judgment about,” Domingo says. Counterintuitively, that critical view was the exact reason he found himself so fascinated by the film. “I wanted to show that it wasn’t just naive women who could find themselves in that position—it can happen to very intelligent women,” he explains. “I’m very much a feminist, and to me, that’s feminist work.”
But Domingo also had to create space inside him for X, even as X betrayed, deceived, and abused Zola’s protagonists (played by Taylour Paige and Riley Keough). As embodying the villain often is, that was complicated work. Work that ultimately found Domingo returning to his home base: love. “I had to love that character,” he says. “I had to understand that he was trying to survive like everyone else in the only way he knew how. That opportunity was a gift.”
Domingo’s emotional generosity is reflective of his core belief about love—that there is no scarcity of it, that it is infinite in its abundance, and that he has a rightful place in its warmth. “I’ve always believed that love was available to me, and I think it’s because I believe that I’ve never had a lack of love in my life.” It might also be why he serendipitously met Raúl, the man who would later become his husband, while shopping at a Walgreens in Berkeley, California. They locked eyes but didn’t talk. When Domingo hopefully scoured Craigslist’s Missed Connections section the next day, he jumped out of his chair when a post that began “I saw you outside of Walgreens in Berkeley” appeared before him.
That was 2005. In 2014, the couple were married, and in the years since they met, Domingo’s success has only grown. That may be a coincidence, sure, but then again, Domingo’s chosen family may be central to his thriving career. “I know I need love to work,” he emphasizes. “I need love to pour into my writing, into my directing—I need it.” Domingo is talking about love in the abstract, but Raúl has taken a key role in Domingo’s professional life as well as his personal life. He’s the first to read Domingo’s scripts, for one thing, largely because Domingo holds his feedback in such high esteem. “That’s what I love about the love we have and the way we create together—he makes me a better artist.”
It’s for that reason that, three years ago, the two started a production company, Edith Productions (named after Domingo’s mother). It’s also likely why Domingo asked Raúl if he would head the endeavor as president, while Domingo himself serves as CEO. “We knew it was the right match because of how much we trust each other,” Domingo says. “We’re totally honest with one another, and that creates harmony.
It’s a fairytale romance, but Domingo’s life isn’t all butterflies and rainbows. In a world of his own making, he’s still a Black man in Hollywood, where racism rages on—both in front of the camera and behind. Even projects that are meant to elevate Black stories and Black artists are not always spared racist power struggles. “I’ve had real deep discussions with producing partners and financiers of a different hue, who may have a blind side to understanding that what they’re doing is on the verge of white supremacy,” Domingo says. “If I’m creating Black art, it’s okay to say [to them], ‘You may not be the authority on this. Perhaps I’m the authority on it.’”
Instead of inciting Domingo’s ire or disgust, he actually sees it as an opportunity to create deeper connections. “I knew I was right, but I was like, I can help you be right as well,” Domingo says buoyantly. “I can help you see what you can’t see. Yes, there’s something wrong, but we’re going to do the work together.” That work isn’t only in service to himself. In Domingo’s view, it’s almost as if isolation is an impossibility; just as the ecosystem requires interdependence to flourish, so does the human family. “Women, people of color, Muslims, gay people—we’re all fighting the same patriarchal, white supremacist system,” Domingo says. “The world moved on a long time ago, so those people who want to keep the status quo, we have to help them and let them know: You’re going to be okay . White men — you’re going to be all right when things are equitable.”
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Not if, but when things are equitable. Domingo’s faith is a brave, fully embodied force, fierce in the face of whatever life brings. Maybe that’s because the seeds he plants are sown with love, and so he trusts that they will bear love in the harvest. “I have a film coming out about Bayard Rustin,” Domingo tells me excitedly when I ask about the future, referring to the gay civil rights legend who inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and organized the March on Washington. Domingo also recently shot and produced a movie called Sing Sing about a prison theater arts rehabilitation program. “It’s about helping these inmates really get in touch with their feelings.” He’ll also be starring in the Netflix limited series The Madness and co-producing the Broadway production of Fat Ham. But maybe most strikingly, Domingo is playing Mister in the upcoming musical feature The Color Purple (out in December of this year). “It’s quite beautiful,” he says. “It holds that spirit of perseverance for African Americans in this country.”
That spirit expresses its tenacity through Domingo himself, but from what I can tell, it isn’t a voice guiding him from a distance, but a spark of creativity that leads him forward from within. “Art is connected to you like God, like your soul,” he explains. “The art I’ve been called to create is a responsibility; it’s about shining a light on our survival and humanity in all its forms. I look to the cosmos, look to nature, look to music to help me— but always, I know that I can create from wherever I am. You can create from wherever you are.” He leans in, his eyes bright. “You just keep finding ways to get to the light.” ❤
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PHOTOGRAPHY Austin Sandhaus, STYLIST Julia Platt-Hepworth, GROOMER Jamie Richmond, PHOTO ASSISTANT Irene Tang, PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Rudy Reynoso, STYLIST ASSISTANT Nikki Ewanouski
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