Colman Domingo

Watch Colman Domingo take a room. In The Running Man (2025) his host Bobby T. works a studio crowd like a preacher and a car salesman at once, and appears to believe every word. Sing Sing (2024) opens on him in costume, on a stage, speaking Shakespeare to an audience we never see, then cuts to him being locked back into a cell. He is a stage actor who never quite left the stage, and he is best when the man he plays is also putting on a show, because then the craft we can always see in him is the point rather than the problem.

He came to it late and sideways: journalism at Temple, regional theatre in San Francisco, Broadway in Passing Strange (2008) and The Scottsboro Boys (2010–11). The screen was slow to notice. Small parts followed in Lincoln (2012), as Ralph Abernathy in Ava DuVernay's Selma (2014) and as the father in Barry Jenkins's If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), good films that did not need him to carry them. Television did the work: eight years as Victor Strand in Fear the Walking Dead (2015–2023), then Ali in Sam Levinson's Euphoria (2019–2026). The leads came with Rustin (2023) for George C. Wolfe and Sing Sing for Greg Kwedar.

Sing Sing is the one to see. He plays Divine G, who runs a prison theatre group while waiting on a clemency hearing, with real generosity, listening more than he talks, and he has a breakdown scene that is technically superb. We admired it, and we were not quite inside it. Beside Divine Eye Maclin, a former inmate who cannot be caught acting, we could see Domingo deciding where to breathe. He is the film's spine; Maclin is its pulse. The same visible skill is a plain asset in comedy. In The Four Seasons (2025) his Danny is the friend whose company we actively wanted to keep, and we laughed at his delivery in a series whose writing mostly settled for familiar complaints.

It goes wrong when a film asks him for size and nothing else. "I'm going to find humanity in the villain," he has said; in Michael (2026) he found the volume instead, playing Joseph Jackson as a large, watchful man who believes fear is a teaching method, at a pitch that empties the rest of the house. Antoine Fuqua's film needed a villain and handed him the job. Elsewhere he is simply under-used: Hugo Wakefield in Spielberg's Disclosure Day (2026) is given less than the billing suggests, the Chief in Ethan Coen's Drive-Away Dolls (2024) exists to send goons after the leads, and the Cowardly Lion in Wicked: For Good (2025) is a voice cameo.

He directs as well, including on The Four Seasons, and has said he never wanted to be only an actor. Fair enough. But the part that fits him best has not quite been written yet: a man performing for a room, in a film that lets us see the performing and cares why.