‘Are the Secret Service gonna come get me?’: Colman Domingo on Rustin, Zendaya and touching Obama

‘The stars aligned,” says Colman Domingo, “that’s why I’m wearing stars on my boots.” He is laughing as he shows me his spotless white Chelsea boots, each with three blue stars up the back. Domingo has an explosive, contagious, almost filthy laugh that often bursts out of his otherwise mellow, succulent baritone. In voice, in dress and in person he is immensely charming.

Quite a few stars have aligned into a Domingo-shaped constellation lately. He has breakout roles in two movies and the actors’ strike has ended just in time for him to talk about them. One is The Color Purple – a lavish adaptation of the musical of Alice Walker’s seminal novel (the white boots are for a photoshoot; he doesn’t wear them all the time). The other is Rustin, a biopic of Bayard Rustin, the unsung organiser of the legendary March on Washington of 1963. Ironically, while he was a champion for Black rights, Rustin’s homosexuality and communist affiliations saw him airbrushed out of the history books. He has been called “the godfather of intersectionality”. “He was openly gay at a time when it truly would have cost him his livelihood and harm to his body,” says Domingo. “I mean, talk about cancel culture.”

Rustin is Domingo’s first proper starring role and it fits him like a glove. “Once I started to do more research about Bayard Rustin, I realised we had some similar aspects,” he says. They’re about the same physical size, Domingo explains. And like Rustin, he is from Pennsylvania, left-handed and gay (he has been married since 2014). “He was very much focused on civil rights, and he happened to be gay,” says Domingo. “That’s the way he thought of himself. I think very similarly; just a man in the world with ideas, thoughts, dreams, wants and needs like everybody else. I happen to be gay … that’s just an addendum to who I am.”

Like his subject, 53-year-old Domingo is finally emerging from the margins, and deservedly so. His energetic, empathic performance is likely to be noticed come awards season, and after 30-odd years as a jobbing character actor, people are starting to notice him cropping up all over the place.

The last time he was here in London was “a bookend”, he says. In 2014, he was just stepping off the stage (in the West End musical The Scottsboro Boys) and on to the screen, having landed a recurring role in zombie spin-off Fear the Walking Dead (the series has just ended, eight seasons later). Since then, screen roles have kept coming: Ava DuVernay’s Selma (as Martin Luther King’s fellow preacher Ralph Abernathy this time), Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, Janicza Bravo’s Zola , the rebooted Candyman. Rustin director George C Wolfe first cast him in his 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, alongside Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman. Clearly, Wolfe saw his leading-man potential.

Like Rustin, Domingo is something of a leader, it seems. Film-makers and actors he has worked with speak of him as an authoritative, charismatic presence who not only delivers on screen (he is notorious for his deep research – he learned to play the trombone for Ma Rainey, the lute for Rustin and the banjo for The Color Purple) but has a steadying, almost guru-like influence off it. This partly explains why Domingo has been so busy lately. “I think people like me. And I like people,” he says, simply. “They know me, and they know: ‘Oh, Colman will help add to our sets, not just as an artist, but as a human being’ … I’m always trying to show them a practice of a way of being; that this is how we make the work. And that kindness is everlasting, and it’s necessary.”

Another repeat customer is Sam Levinson, creator of HBO teen phenomenon Euphoria. Having cast Domingo in his 2018 satire Assassination Nation, Levinson wrote the role of Ali – mentor and sponsor to Zendaya’s recovering addict Rue – specifically for him. One of the show’s standout episodes is effectively an hour-long two-hander between the two actors, in which Ali delivers a deep life sermon to Rue over pancakes in a diner.

“We trust each other as if we’ve known each other for millennia,” he says of Zendaya. “She is one of my favourite scene partners, because I never know what she’s going to do. She’s so honest, and we really dance together, which is beautiful.”

They haven’t quite known each other for millennia, but not far off, it turned out. Among his many jobs as a struggling actor over the years, Domingo once worked for the California Shakespeare Company around San Francisco. Chatting to Zendaya on set one day, she mentioned that her mother used to work there, and she would go and watch the plays, aged five or six. She especially remembered one production (All’s Well That Ends Well) where a guy dressed in white rode in on a motorcycle. Of course, it was Domingo: “I remembered, I would pull up on a motorcycle and get off and do this speech to the audience, and there was a little curly haired girl upfront and I was like: ‘Who’s this kid out here at nine o’clock at night watching Shakespeare?’ And it was Zendaya!”

As it prepares for a third season, Euphoria has been beset by claims that some cast members felt uncomfortable about the levels of nudity and sexual content. “Honestly, in my experience, there was none of that,” says Domingo. “I think there’s a lot of talk around it. And I think things get blown out of proportion.” He describes Levinson as “one of the kindest, open-hearted director-writer-producers that you could ever ask for. There’s just noise because it’s popular and it’s in the zeitgeist. You can’t have a successful show without people wanting to tear some things down.”

Despite his kindly presence, Domingo often brings a compelling hint of menace or darkness to his characters. It’s on the surface with roles such as the often ruthless Victor Strand in Fear the Walking Dead, or his African-accented pimp in Zola. In The Color Purple he plays the abusive antagonist Mister, who cruelly beats and rapes his teenage wife. Rustin also has his demons, and Euphoria’s Ali has a history of domestic violence – when it seems as if it will rise to the surface at one point, the threat is palpable.

“And I’m such a nice guy!” says Domingo, bursting into his huge laugh. “The characters that have menace, a lot of them are the most interesting to me,” he says more seriously. “I generally think people who make choices of generosity and kindness and love in that spirit every day, understand darkness probably even more. They know what they’re fighting against.”

Related: ‘He never hid himself’: the incredible life of gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin

Domingo had a typical working-class background, he says. Raised in Philadelphia, the third of four children, his mother was primarily a homemaker and his stepfather sanded floors for a living. His biological father was from Belize, hence the surname, and left the family when Domingo was nine. He came out to his family at 21 “and they just loved and embraced me exactly the way I was”. At Temple University he took an acting class as an elective, “and someone said: ‘I think you’re gifted in this.’ And I took that seriously.” He left college, moved to San Francisco and came up the hard way, he says: “You’re looking at 32 years in this industry: ups and downs, highs and lows, bartending, teaching, not working for long periods of time, finding my way, building theatre companies, becoming a playwright, becoming a director, becoming a producer … I didn’t have the luxury to just be an actor.”

Now, he is hanging out with the likes of Oprah Winfrey (who produced The Color Purple) and the Obamas (whose production company produced Rustin – while in the White House, Barack Obama posthumously awarded Bayard Rustin the presidential medal of freedom in 2013). When Domingo first met the Obamas he was kind of starstruck, he admits. “I was giddy; they are two of the most charismatic human beings walking the planet.” Now, though, “we’re in a different relationship, we’re telling a story together”. He hung out with them just last week, in fact, introducing the movie at a festival. “I found myself just touching Barack Obama, patting him on the shoulder like an old buddy. And I thought, am I actually [allowed]? Are Secret Service gonna come get me or something?”

Related: Rustin review – Colman Domingo shines in by-the-numbers civil rights biopic

The stars may have aligned for Domingo at last, but he is not quite clicking his star-spangled heels. One dark cloud on the horizon is the current state of his country, particularly when it comes to recent attempts to ban library books and suppress education dealing with LGBTQ+ identity and the US’s history of racism against Black people. It’s hard to feel triumphant about Rustin’s achievements when those battles still need to be fought today. “There are forces in this world trying to send us right back to 1963,” he says. “And at this time it’s important for a film like Rustin to rally not only young people but thought – to combat hopelessness, to let people know that they have the power to galvanise and make this country what we want it to be. That’s why I think that the film is divine timing. We need someone to say: ‘This ordinary man gave his life in service to us all. What are you going to do?’”

• Rustin is out now and available on Netflix.