Colman Domingo Is Suddenly Everywhere, From Euphoria to Disclosure Day
Colman Domingo was photographed May 1 by Emman Montalvan at PMC Studios in Los Angeles. Styling by Wayman and Micah. Tom Ford suit, shirt, tie; Boucheron jewelry; Omega watch.
Photographed by Emman Montalvan; Grooming by Jamie Richmond.
After the 2024 Golden Globes, Glen Powell found himself on a plane that also happened to be transporting an entire girls soccer team. After blowing through what he estimated to be 30 selfies over the course of a 15-minute boarding process, Powell lowered his baseball cap over his eyes and attempted to decompress. A few seconds later, two hands came out of nowhere and shook him.
“I’m like, ‘What is happening?’ ” he remembers. “I look up and I was two inches away from his face, and he goes, ‘You sexy son of a bitch!’ ”
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This is how Powell first met Colman Domingo.
Jacquemus suit, shirt, tie; Boucheron jewelry; Omega watch.
Photographed by Emman Montalvan
The introduction was not unwarranted — they had just been cast to star alongside each other in the remake of The Running Man. Domingo asked Powell to have dinner together that evening, or at least the best approximation of a dinner that can be offered at 30,000 feet. Crowded in the galley with the flight attendants, they ate airline food and drank tequila.
“We just chatted about his husband and his affinity for throwing parties and this run he’s on at this point in his life,” recalls Powell. “I fell in love with Colman Domingo on that flight.”
Audiences’ introduction to Domingo isn’t terribly dissimilar. Domingo, 56, is a force who seemingly came out of nowhere, quickly endearing himself to audiences to the point where it’s hard to remember a time when he wasn’t on our screens.
He owes his current ubiquity to the release of two studio tentpoles — the Michael Jackson biopic Michael and, in June, Steven Spielberg’s latest, Disclosure Day — plus the hotly anticipated final season of the HBO drama Euphoria and the second season of the cozy Netflix comedy The Four Seasons, for which he also serves as a director.
If Hollywood is well and truly in a period of contraction, no one has told Domingo.
It may seem uncharacteristic for a two-time Oscar nominee, Emmy winner and a perennial best-dressed-list designee to suggest a Starbucks in a Malibu strip mall (albeit a strip mall with an ocean view) as a meeting spot to discuss these many projects. But Domingo says he wanted to talk “somewhere I actually go.” (For the record, Domingo’s Starbucks order is a 1971 dark roast with a splash of oat milk.)
Much of the narrative that has surrounded Domingo thus far has been about the hustle — the decades spent as a theater fixture and character actor before Hollywood turned its long overdue attention his way.
When asked whether he would have welcomed success earlier, he laughs, “I think my finances would have wanted it, yeah.” And then he earnestly offers: “Maybe I’m saying this now because of the way things have been mapped out, but I feel like I wouldn’t change a thing. I really wouldn’t.”
Whether or not recognition came at the right moment, one thing is certain: Now that it is here, Domingo is having a damn good time.
He moves effortlessly between drama and comedy, blockbuster and indie, prestige and populist. One weekend, audiences can watch him running through a cadre of memorable eccentrics on Saturday Night Live, and the next sitting opposite Zendaya dispensing wisdom in Euphoria, and the next as a snarling Joe Jackson in Michael. In between, he pops up in unexpected places, like a Sabrina Carpenter music video or as the voice of the Cowardly Lion in Wicked: For Good.
“Maybe it’s because I’m sort of leaning into the third act of my career,” says Domingo. “For a long time, as artists, we’re in our ‘planting seeds’ phase. I feel like I’m in an incredible harvest period.”
“Sometimes you have to move the needle yourself before the industry moves it for you,” says Domingo. Jacquemus suit, shirt, tie; Boucheron jewelry; Omega watch; Kurt Geiger shoes.
Photographed by Emman Montalvan
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“I think people from Philadelphia have a really finely tuned bullshit sensor. Colman can tell when something’s bullshit, in the best way,” says Tina Fey, who cast Domingo in her Netflix dramedy The Four Seasons and quickly found a kindred spirit in her fellow Philly native.
What’s something Domingo calls bullshit on? “Anyone who says they don’t have time for love, they don’t have time for this or that, that’s bullshit,” he says of the importance of creativ