Out there is a video, captured on someone’s phone, in which Colman Domingo, star of last year’s affecting prison drama Sing Sing, can be seen onstage during the Oscars, doing a jaunty little dance. As he bops along to Maze’s “Before I Let Go,” his lank frame a blur of scarlet and black Valentino, he shouts out members of the audience—“C’mon, Cynthia! C’mon, Penélope!”—not that they need much persuading: The entire front row, from Kylie Jenner to Demi Moore, is on their feet.
Some 30 years into his professional acting career, the 55-year-old Domingo is surely one of the most celebrated men in Hollywood right now. Not celebrated as in winningest, per se—though he’s won an Emmy and been nominated for two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs, four SAG Awards, two Tonys (including one as a producer), and an Olivier—but in the “wow, people love this guy” way. Bradley Cooper has called him “a luminous human being.” George C. Wolfe has praised his “joyful, playful, available spirit.” Per Oprah Winfrey, Domingo is “the real deal.”
For what it’s worth, this writer can also vouch for Domingo as genuinely lovely company. Over lunch at New York’s Café Chelsea (an endive salad and coffee for me; endive salad, a cheeseburger, and two lemonades—“Why not!”—for him), he regales me with stories from his childhood in Philadelphia: trailing his older siblings to see Carrie and the latest Bruce Lee movie (his older brother, Rick, was a big Lee fan); helping his mother, Edith, decide which wig to wear. (One favorite improbably combined an Afro, cornrows, and straight bangs.) Glimpses of his sun-dappled life out in Malibu with his husband and producing partner, Raúl, also surface; Domingo informs me that Raúl, who only recently learned how to drive a car, is now flying planes. (This is a couple that can’t resist a whim; their glancing first encounter outside a Berkeley Walgreens in 2005 led to a Craigslist “missed connections” posting and then their first date.) Domingo is tall and nicely groomed but unfussy, dressed in an oversized white button-down, a baseball cap, and a smattering of gold jewelry. He laughs loudly and often.
Of course, Domingo’s good name has been dutifully earned, built up across more than 60 film and television roles and many years working in the theater, whether as an actor, director, or playwright. (He began his stage career in San Francisco after studying at Temple University in Philadelphia.) Yet to the general American public, he wasn’t really a thing until about 2019, when he first appeared as Ali Muhammad, an NA sponsor and friend to Zendaya’s troubled Rue Bennett, on Euphoria. His performance in that wildly popular HBO series—otherwise known for its lurid color palette and operatic sexual drama—crackled with wisdom and moving warmth, scoring him that Emmy.
It was the sort of part that Domingo’s mother, who died in 2006, had wanted for him from the beginning; one that would “be in service to people,” he says. “I can make people laugh, make people feel things, and that would be my greatest gift.” So, too, did Ali help deliver Domingo from journeyman-actor purgatory, appearing in everything—police procedurals! Sketch shows! Post-apocalyptic horror series! Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln! Ava DuVernay’s Selma!—but never at the top of a call sheet.
“I think that was the beginning of people seeing me as a leading man,” Domingo says. “I’d been a supportive player for many long years, happily. And for a long time I thought maybe the lead was always meant for someone else…while knowing that I could probably do well if I had the opportunity.”
When the opportunity did come, with 2023’s Rustin, Domingo received his first Oscar nomination for best actor. (Directed by Wolfe, the film is an elegant portrait of political activist Bayard Rustin, a key organizer behind the March on Washington who was also an openly gay, lute-playing Quaker.) But more than just ratcheting up his profile, Rustin’s promotion cycle announced Domingo as one of the best-dressed men in show business.
At a time when most Hollywood actors pin a brooch to their tuxedo jacket and call it a day, Domingo’s spirited experiments with color and silhouette mark him out, with the likes of Timothée Chalamet and Jeremy Strong, as a stylish exception. For the world premiere of The Color Purple, in which Domingo played the terrifying Mister, he chose an amazing burgundy suit—complete with a satin train—from Louis Vuitton; for the 2024 Critics Choice Awards he wore mustard yellow Valentino; and his whimsically proportioned Boss jacket, high-waisted trousers, and bowed necktie zhuzhed up the carpet at last year’s BAFTAs.
Domingo has always appreciated clothes. His mother, stepfather, and Belizean birth father all had their own “style and swagger,” he says, and as a child, he can remember admiring the bell-bottoms of the session musicians who lived next door. (In his 30s, his first designer purchase was a set of Tom Ford bow ties from Barneys when he was doing Passing Strange on Broadway.) Yet his recent prominence on the red carpet has pushed him to be ever more deliberate about the way he puts himself together. Mapping out his Sing Sing press tour, for example, Domingo had a tricky balance to strike. The film, inspired by the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program established at Sing Sing almost 30 years ago, centers on a group of prisoners staging a play, and its real-life cast was mostly formerly incarcerated men. (One, Clarence Maclin, took home a Gotham Award for his truly great supporting turn.) Domingo “didn’t want to take away the shine from the costars,” he explains. “I wanted to put the energy on them, not on what I was looking like.” So, for the first part of the season last fall, he and his longtime stylists, Wayman Bannerman and Micah McDonald, reached for restrained, even vaguely militaristic silhouettes, mostly in black: a monogrammed Gucci moment at the LACMA Art+Film Gala, for example.
Yet as time went on—and Domingo made more appearances alone—“I would stunt just a little bit,” he says, cracking a smile. The internet went berserk for his polka-dotted shirt and scarf tie, both by Alessandro Michele for Valentino, at the Golden Globes (a house ambassador, Domingo feels that he and Michele were “cut from the same cloth”), as it did for his 50 shades of Boss brown at the Critics Choice Awards.
By now, Domingo looks about as natural on a carpet as most regular people do stalking a grocery aisle—but he does not, for even one moment, take his visibility in these spaces for granted. Ahead of this year’s Met Gala, where he’ll serve as a co-chair, Domingo met with Monica L. Miller, guest curator of the Costume Institute’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibition, to start scouting references. What he didn’t anticipate was becoming quite so moved at the sight of Black mannequins. “I am a Black man who loves style, loves tailoring, and it struck me that I had never seen images like that—of myself, saying, I belong in these clothes,” he says. “I always had to look for a vision outside of myself.”
In a way, it was a similar impulse—to embrace joy—that led Domingo to The Four Seasons, a new half-hour comedy from Tina Fey, Lang Fisher (Never Have I Ever), and Tracey Wigfield (30 Rock, The Mindy Project), streaming on Netflix this May. After jumping from The Color Purple and Rustin directly into Sing Sing and The Madness—a thriller series that cast Domingo as a news pundit being framed for the brutal murder of a white supremacist—his body and mind were crying out for lighter fare: “I thought, This Tina Fey series is an opportunity to wear a sweater and laugh.”
Inspired by Alan Alda’s 1981 rom-com of the same name, the show centers on six 40- and 50-something married friends who must reckon with a new, young girlfriend in the mix after one couple splits up. Domingo is hysterically funny as Danny, a caustic interior decorator feeling suffocated by his worrywart Italian husband (the delightful Marco Calvani).
“As a scene partner, Colman is a dream,” Fey tells me via email. “He’s generous and playful and prepared. Also he’s really tall, which is great for actresses over 50, cause you can look up and smooth out your neck. Highly recommend.”
Another thing to know about Domingo is that he takes his pleasure as deadly seriously as his work. He celebrates each and every birthday with Champagne and oysters (a tradition he commenced at 21); he has been known to host raging parties with Natasha Lyonne; and between the photo shoots and interview clips and trailers on his Instagram feed is normie footage of him hiking, or peeking out from a hammock, or riding a carousel, or dancing for no discernible reason. Even while shooting The Four Seasons in upstate New York, Domingo and Raúl rented a four-bedroom house so that they could have people over, use the sundry fireplaces, and watch the sunset.
For Domingo, these things aren’t indulgent trifles so much as exercises in common sense: “You need love. You need art. You need all these things in order to do the work you’re doing, whatever work that is,” he says. And he has so much work on the horizon: season three of Euphoria, Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic (Domingo is playing his father, Joe), Edgar Wright’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man, Gus Van Sant’s crime drama Dead Man’s Wire, and an as-yet-untitled Steven Spielberg film. Also, two directorial efforts: his feature debut, Scandalous!, about the doomed love affair between Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr., starring Sydney Sweeney (who brought him the script) and David Jonsson; and a Nat King Cole biopic, in which Domingo is also meant to star.
I don’t even need to say it: “I feel like I’m firing on all cylinders,” Domingo says, sipping the last of his lemonade. “I feel like telling everybody’s story. Everything that can possibly live in this body, I’m here for it—and I’m also here for the fun and the fashion and the shenanigans. I don’t know how long this is going to last, but while it’s happening right now, I’m going to enjoy myself.” Who could doubt him?
In this story: grooming, Jamie Richmond; barber, Jacki Brown; tailor, Cha Cha Zutic; manicurist, Caroline Cotten. Produced by Boom Productions. Set Design: Spencer Vrooman. Florals by Schentell Nunn at Offerings.
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