The “old-school actors” who influenced Colman Domingo on and off-screen
Should Colman Domingo be much more famous than he is? He’s a two-time Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee and Emmy winner with 30 years of work behind him. Yes, absolutely, he should be. Is he likely to get more famous once this year is done with? Again, yes.
That’s because Domingo, who picked up Oscar nods in consecutive years for the civil rights drama Rustin and the prison movie Sing Sing, has a massive 12 months ahead of him that should finally make him something of a household name. To start with, he has the latest season of the Zendaya-starring teen drama Euphoria hitting screens in April. Then the same month, there’s the Michael Jackson biopic Michael, in which he plays the patriarch Joe Jackson.
Also, this year, Domingo will line up in Disclosure Day, the long-awaited new sci-fi from Steven Spielberg with Emily Blunt that promises to be a blockbuster hit. And if that weren’t enough alien mischief, he’s also in Strange Arrivals with Demi Moore about a couple who get abducted by extra-terrestrials. Then, as though Michael weren’t enough, he’s also in pre-production on a Nat King Cole biopic and working on a drama called True-ish.
All of this is quite a feat for an actor who was thinking about quitting altogether just over ten years ago when he missed out on a role on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire due to his skin not being light enough for the part. Despite having been Tony-award nominated for his work on stage on Broadway, Domingo felt like his screen career had peaked, and there was only one way down.
Instead, he hired a new management team and went on a run that saw him cast in movies like the 2015 Oscar winner Selma, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2020, which also won two Oscars, the Candyman reboot the following year and voice work on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Domingo is also known for his sartorial excellence, with Vogue describing him as one of the best-dressed celebrities, something Domingo takes from some of the great actors of years gone by.
Domingo told the NME: “I’ve always admired those old-school actors like Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier. Style is about making people feel something, about telling a story.”
Poitier, like Domingo, was also a writer and director who was known as one of his generation’s best-dressed men, as well as the first black man to win a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar in 1964. Gable and Grant, meanwhile, were two of the sharpest-dressed stars of the ‘30s and ‘40s, Gable in his V-knit sweaters and Grant favouring well-tailored suits.
This week, Netflix also announced the air date for season two of Domingo’s comedy drama series The Four Seasons, co-starring Tina Fey and Steve Carell. May 28th will see the next helping of the show about boomers taking on four holidays in a year, which was based on a 1981 movie written and directed by MASH’s Alan Alda.
Domingo has also directed one of the episodes in the new season, and feels that the ability to jump behind the camera sums him up, telling Esquire: ”I’ve never been a person who could just do one thing. My whole career has been that way, and I find that I’m a stronger actor because I direct, a stronger director because I act, a stronger writer because of all of it.”
