Colman Domingo on Sing Sing and the Power of Theater

Can a musical comedy featuring Hamlet and Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger change lives?

Actor, playwright, and director Colman Domingo thinks so. In Sing Sing, he stars in a true story about the power of theater. Inspired by the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing prison, Domingo plays Divine G, imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, who finds purpose by acting in a theater troupe. When a wary outsider joins the group, they decide to stage their first original comedy. The ensemble cast stars formerly incarcerated actors and RTA alumni, including Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin and Sean San José.

Domingo takes us behind the scenes of the making of Sing Sing. He also shares how he became an actor after a class at Temple University and his own Shakespeare story including an inventive take on Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

Colman Domingo is beloved for onscreen portrayals including Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin in Netlfix’s Rustin for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Other films include Lincoln, Selma, If Beale Street Could Talk, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola, and The Color Purple. His breakthrough came as conman Victor Strand on Fear the Walking Dead. He won an Emmy for his performance as Ali on HBO Max’s Euphoria. On stage he was nominated for Tony and Olivier awards for his role as Mr. Bones in The Scottsboro Boys. He wrote the book for the Broadway musical Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2024.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 30, 2024. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Paola Garcia Acuna. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

[Music plays]

BOGAEV: Actor Colman Domingo joins us today. He’s been performing for decades, but you might not have recognized his name until his recent starring role in the Netflix biopic Rustin.

[CLIP from the 2023 Netflix movie Rustin. Colman Domingo is Bayard Rustin.]

BAYARD RUSTIN: What they really want to destroy is all of us coming together and demanding this country change.

BOGAEV: Domingo earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. But if you’re a fan of Fear the Walking Dead, you might know him as the con man Victor Strand.

[CLIP from AMC’s television series, Fear the Walking Dead. Colman Domingo is Victor Strand.]

VICTOR STRAND: I look at a person like you and I know. You are a buyer. How do I know? Because I am a closer.

BOGAEV: Domingo has also had supporting roles in lots of movies, including Selma, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Lincoln, and he won an Emmy for his portrayal of a recovering drug addict on the HBO series Euphoria.

And remember the Broadway musical The Scottsboro Boys? Domingo was nominated for a Tony and an Olivier award for his role as Mr. Bones. In fact, he’s had a long career as a multi-hyphenate actor, producer, director, and playwright. He even co-produced James Ijames’ play Fat Ham, an adaptation of Hamlet, and he has performed in many Shakespeare productions.

Now, Domingo stars in the new movie Sing Sing. It’s about a theater program inside a maximum-security prison. He plays Divine G, a founding member of the theater troupe. G develops an unlikely bond with a notorious tough guy called Divine Eye, whose life is transformed by acting. And yep, it’s two guys called Divine.

[CLIP from the 2023 A24 movie, Sing Sing. Colman Domingo is Divine G and Clarence Maclin is Divine Eye.]

DIVINE EYE: Some of the things the brother was saying in the book really resonated with me, man. I mean, the brother said, what did the brother say? He said, “When we are born, we cry because we’re born to a stage of fools.” And I said, “Yo, whoever wrote this, man, had to do a bid before,” you know?

DIVINE G: So, King Lear just fell off of a library cart and you just happened to pick it up and read a few pages.

DIVINE EYE: Yeah, shit, shit funny, right?

BOGAEV: The movie is based on a real program at Sing Sing, called Rehabilitation Through the Arts (or RTA), It tells a true story behind the staging of a play called Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code. It’s a musical written by the RTA director Brent Buell.

Domingo’s character, “Divine G,” is based on a real person, John Whitfield. Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin portrays himself in the film, and lots of the movie’s secondary characters are played by men who’ve gone through the RTA program, too.

Domingo co-produced the movie and helped write it with the director-producer team of Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, and he’s on the line with me now.

 ——————-

COLMAN DOMINGO: Hello, hello.

BOGAEV: Colman Domingo, is that you?

DOMINGO: No, no, it’s Meryl Streep. I’m actually such an incredible actress that I’m playing Colman Domingo today.

BOGAEV: Meryl, your acting gets better and better.

DOMINGO: I know, I know. I thought I’d surprise you today. You’re welcome.

BOGAEV: What is—this will be the hundredth Oscar?

DOMINGO: Exactly.

BOGAEV: The film opens with you performing the ending of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s just this gorgeously lit and staged production, it looks professional. And then the camera pulls back, and you just get dropped into this brutal reemergence into the reality of Sing Sing. So tell me about that decision to start there.

DOMINGO: So, you know, we began Sing Sing with Lysander from Midsummer Night’s Dream. And that was a very conscious decision because we were trying to think of our way into the film.

As we were creating and developing the film, we were thinking about, you know, some themes of Shakespeare. And one in particular was the theme of brotherhood; how Shakespeare would say it’s the most important bond, more than man and woman. He believed that the bond of brotherhood and the bond of sisterhood is even stronger. So we wanted to lead with that.

So, for us, it was like, lead with a theme of Shakespeare. But also the language of Lysander, which really sets up our character and really sort of the internal conflict of what’s going on. It’s about love, ultimately, but I think it’s also about grace.

And so we open on that, and we want to put him in the middle of it. Now, we also know that Lysander is a lover in Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’s not a king or a prince but we decided, even with costume, to put him in a crown and a cape because in this production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream you can do anything. In this version, Divine G has decided he’s wearing a crown. And then we strip him bare afterwards and he goes back into his prison greens in the scene right after.

So for us that’s also layered in Lysander’s language. You know, he said, “But either it was different in blood. Or else misgraphed in their respective years. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends. Or, if there were sympathy in choice, war, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, making it momentary as a sound, swift as a shadow, short as any dream, brief as the lightning in the collied night, that, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and Earth, and, ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’.”

Behold about your dreams, that they’re realized. And then he believes that, “The jaws of darkness do devour it up, so quick bright things come to confusion.” He is in the middle of his fully realized dream of performance of being somewhere else outside of the walls of Sing Sing Prison and in the next scene it does exactly that. It pulls the rug out from underneath him. He’s back in a cage.

BOGAEV: And why did you want to start with Shakespeare?

DOMINGO: Shakespeare can give you words and language for things that you don’t even know that’s happening to you. You know what I mean? So I think it was just important because I feel like the characters have size. I mean, look, this film takes place in a maximum-security prison where the characters are sort of living in their own… I think sometimes in their own operas. In a way, everything has a bit more size and a bit more stakes, like a good Shakespeare play as well. Everything is life or death. Everything is when you love, you love hard, when you dream, you dream vividly. So I think that that’s why we started with Shakespeare, because I think it really, sort of, helps us with the container that we’re in.

BOGAEV: You know, we talk a lot on this podcast about the paradox of Shakespeare. That you have this exclusive-inclusive tension. On the one hand people can feel that they aren’t educated enough or smart enough or rich enough or white enough or whatever enough to get Shakespeare, to be allowed in. But also that the poetry and the themes can be universal to everyone’s experience.

DOMINGO: Well, that’s exactly it, because I think that even my costar, Clarence Maclin, how he says in the film he picked up King Lear and he was like, he related it to his own experience. It’s funny because I think people sometimes are afraid of Shakespeare or feel like Shakespeare belongs to someone else but Shakespeare wrote for the people and I think you just have to know that you can find yourself in it. Because it is language that you just have to, like with anything else, you just have to understand, you know, the cadence of it and the rhythms of it and how it operates and then it feels more personal to you. I think that’s why Shakespeare has been around for so long.

BOGAEV: Yes. So what did you think when the producers approached you to play Divine G in this story? Were you immediately on board?

DOMINGO: From the very beginning, absolutely. Because I thought that, you know, wow, what a great program Rehabilitation Through the Arts is—basically, you know, what we’re exploring in this film.

And I do—you know, as being a theater practitioner for so many years, I know the power of theater and I feel like I’m sort of, like, you know—I know I’m preaching to the choir on this podcast, but we know that theater changes and saves lives in many ways. By finding a place to express, a place to create, to build community, it’s all in there. So that’s why I know that it’s such a valuable tool.

And the fact that they found this tool valuable inside of a maximum-security prison is awe inspiring. That these guys would come together and take ownership of language and sort of their own journey of healing, and it’s been so good for them. The moment I found out certain things about them—there’s a 3% recidivism rate compared to the 60% nationwide because of these programs—I thought how extraordinary.

BOGAEV: You’re a producer on the film as well. How did you and the director, producing team of Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, collaborate on the script and the character development?

DOMINGO: Well, it all began with some Zoom meetings, actually. Because we met up, and they told me they had this idea, and they’d been racking their brain with versions of the scripts for like six years, and then they put it away. Then, it was something that was still in their mind.

And so Greg Kwedar pulled it out, and he did a treatment. It took about an hour, and then he wrote my name down at the bottom of the page. I don’t know if he divined me or something or like—you know, I don’t know—but we eventually met up and they told me about these ideas.

And I said, “Well, send me a script to sell.” “Well, we don’t have one, but we can send you an article that was done in Esquire magazine about this.” I read it and I thought it was fascinating. I said, “I’d like to jump on board.” And they said, “Yeah, we want you with all your superpowers—as a writer, director, actor, and a producer.” So, my production company came on board as well.

We decided to start interrogating and wrestling with ideas together for a script. Building upon scenes upon scenes, we invited Clarence Maclin in to read scenes with me. So they would go back and write scenes and present them to us and we’d read them and we’d talk about it. We’d talk about what works, what doesn’t work, what is important to us. And then they would go away and write some more until we came up with a draft. This happened over a course of some months.

Really, at the end of the day, it’s about that bonded brotherhood that I talked about that was important for me when it comes to themes of Shakespeare. You know, of course these guys should feel like that they would never, ever interact with each other, but they come together because of the theater.

That’s a beautiful journey. I think that was very important to us to also show tenderness between men. Because I’m sure, as far as I know, that most images are counter to the truth of Black and Brown men.

Because what I’ve found is these men, they were doing the work and being responsible to each other and holding a space to allow each other to have these feelings and explore these characters and be vulnerable. Which is what they had not been allowed to do in the world. And that has been a part of the healing to hold that sort of space for each other. So I wanted to show that as well.

BOGAEV: So how did you start on your character, Divine G? What did you do first?

DOMINGO: You know, the first thing I did was sort of just, you know… how can I say this? If I’m going to play someone that’s alive and well, I need to find my way in but also to liberate myself. To find them and have some kind of creative and artistic license with them as well

And then when I get the opportunity to meet with him—as I did, and we had a lovely dinner—I just listened. I don’t think I asked a lot. I just went to get to know him, like I would get to know anyone, and take in also sort of the things of the way he holds his glasses or the way he looks off to the side and thinks. I was, sort of, you know, downloading all that information, all that, the stuff that you can’t research, you know? Physicality, things like that.

BOGAEV: Right, the stuff they might not even know about themselves, I would think, yeah.

And I thought it was really interesting you picked up on he’s someone who’s very disciplined. He’s like somebody who’s gone through basic training, you said somewhere, and that informed your performance. So how do you hold yourself differently knowing that? Or are all these details in the back of your mind percolating?

DOMINGO: I think that’s exactly—I think that there’s a strange thing that an artist can do when you’re open and you’re listening and you’re downloading information, hoping that it stays with you in some way. I feel like even when I research or think about something, I will go to set and be as open as possible.

But knowing that I’ve done the work of observation, and feeling, and details, that it will show up. I trust that. I feel like now, you know, it’s a process that I trust as an actor after many years of doing this work.

BOGAEV: I’m also thinking that you created some of these lovely little moments that show… well, that embody who I think Divine G is. At one point you did this joyful little pirouette in a hallway by yourself.

DOMINGO: That’s exactly it. I’m so—first of all, I’m glad you noticed that too, because that is actually one of those sort of grace notes of just the conversation I had with him that wasn’t in the script.

I talked to my director and I said, “Hey, you know what? I know that Divine G wanted to be a dancer when he grew up. But he sort of would get teased on the way home about being a dancer and wanting to do ballet or jazz. And so he stopped. But when he was talking to me about it, he sort of lit up. It was a light in his eyes.”

And I thought, “I want to make sure that I have that little bit of light that’s still inside.” That’s that hope. That there’s still a dancer inside of you that never ends your love of dance.

So one is just put it in a moment. I didn’t know where… I didn’t lay out where it was going to happen. I just thought I want to try to find a moment here and then when I was just waiting outside, as my co-star goes in for his audition.

I just it felt right and it’s just… because, listen, I downloaded the information and in the moment you put the camera on me it comes out because it’s already inside. I didn’t know what’s going to come out at that moment, but it did. Because I’m a moment-to-moment kind of actor, but I had a lot of information downloaded into my computer of my brain and my soul, and it was able to flourish in that moment.

BOGAEV: Okay, back to Shakespeare for a little bit. Clarence Maclin’s character, Divine Eye. He plays himself but he also plays Hamlet in the play  within your film.

And first of all, it’s just so great that this comedy fantasy with mummies and pirates and cowboys also has Hamlet in it.

DOMINGO: Oh my!

BOGAEV: Yeah. Was Hamlet in the original production that RTA staged way back when?

DOMINGO: All those characters, Hamlet and Freddy Krueger, and—yeah, yeah, exactly—and Gladiator, Goliath, they were all in that crazy, crazy play that Brent Buell created.

BOGAEV: And in the film, Maclin takes a few running starts at, “To be or not to be,” in rehearsal. And you collaborated with Maclin all along in the writing and the performance. So how much of that was you? How do you work on that scene together?

DOMINGO: I think that, you know… it’s funny because I think it was even written that Divine G, you know, he—probably something general like, “He takes over and coaches.” So Greg and I, we talked about it. We’re like, “Well, what would he say? Well, what kind of advice would you give?”

And so I would go to teacher Colman—the Colman that’s been a professor at colleges. And so I would say things like this. I would try to find—meet a person where they live. You know what I mean? I’m like, “Oh, where has their course of study ed them?” And I thought,” Oh, I need to go to the streets in a way and tell him who he is and just say, ‘Oh no, you do the thing that you did out in the yard. I watched you do it. So I know you can do it. Apply that here. Come in like a king, like you own everything.’”

And that’ll really even give them a little bit of history. I was saying, you know, people in the world, maybe, the systems of the world, would rather you come in with their head down. And it’s up for us as Black men to stand up proud and tall.

That’s something he knew that Brent Buell—the character of Brent Buell played by Paul Raci—could not give him. He couldn’t give him that context, but I knew that I could as Divine G. So that’s how we start to craft that scene.

And you know, my director, Greg, we’re like, “Oh, that’s great. Let’s go for that. Let’s try that.”

BOGAEV: I want to ask you about the prisons as your set because somewhere I read that you said there’s no acting that has to be done when you’re in a prison cell, the air is different in there. So what is the air like? What was it like to film in these various prison settings that you were in?

DOMINGO: Well, I think… how can I say this? There is a certain amount of, you know, imagination that you have to use when you’re on a spare set, of course, you know, “We’re in Verona.”

But then when you go into the set and you’re actually on a decommissioned prison you have to let that do the work as well for you. You have to understand, I think, spatial relationships. You understand positions of power. You understand the flow of the institution.

I could never find my way around. I was constantly lost. But that’s by design of the hallways. Everything looks like…

BOGAEV: To disorient you.

DOMINGO: Yeah, disorient you. You’re constantly going in a circle in many ways.

BOGAEV: And in the movie, Divine G, you often go out to a hallway with a window to decompress or to talk to people. I mean, obviously you want some light, but it’s so clear that this character needs that glimpse outside to keep himself grounded.

DOMINGO: Yeah, and we even made a moment, Greg had this beautiful moment of me putting… he said he loved thinking of my hand outside. You know, just feeling the air, maybe catching some of the breeze as it goes by.

That how symbolic it is that he’s still yearning and still hopeful that he can get outside because a lot of times, you know, people don’t believe that they’re going to be outside anymore. That this is now their life. But this is someone who’s still hopeful and still believing and having faith.

BOGAEV: Yeah. I’d like to switch gears for a moment and ask you about your experience with Shakespeare. I know that you played Lysander, the lover, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the California Shakespeare Theater early on in your career. And I wonder, do you still remember your lines?

DOMINGO: I do. I do. You know, I remember certain monologues. I remember Mercutio. I haven’t done them in a while, but usually they come back. I’ve played Mercutio. I’ve played Lysander. I’ve played Speed in Two Gents. I’ve played Costard.

BOGAEV: You play Costard?

DOMINGO: I’ve played Costard. I’ve gone between playing lovers and clowns. I’ve always wanted to play Feste. That’s one of my favorite clowns.

BOGAEV: Why?

DOMINGO: But every time I’ve been offered, I’ve always had a schedule problem. Feste is fascinating to me because he is… well, all the clowns, they’re the psyche. They’re actually so intelligent. And I love that the fool is not really a fool he plays the fool.

But yeah, I go between clowns and lovers. That tells you a lot about me.

BOGAEV: I think you did a Twelfth Night in San Francisco with some gender bending casting.

DOMINGO: Yeah, that was early on in my career. That was about in 1994, 95, before anyone was doing anything like that. That was directed by Danny Shea, who used to run Shakespeare Santa Cruz, who’s also a phenomenal actor in the Bay Area.

BOGAEV: What did you play?

DOMINGO: I played Antonio, the unrequited lover, you know, right? And also, Twelfth Night is always one of my favorites because even the way it ends, no one’s really happy. It’s a little bittersweet.

People feel like, “Oh no, well now you’re with—you fell in love with that person. Well now you belong with that person. Well here’s the right gender.” No, you fell in love with the other person, actually. Everything’s not in order, actually. It’s bittersweet.

BOGAEV: All the Antonios are sad.

DOMINGO: Yeah, they are. All the Antonios are sad. I know, Shakespeare must have had a thing with Antonio.

BOGAEV: Yeah.

DOMINGO: I’m telling you, Antonio is a sad character.

BOGAEV: You wonder, you’ve got to wonder. What was your first exposure to Shakespeare? Was it in school or did you see a play?

DOMINGO: No, when I was in high school, it was just… I felt like it was so foreign to me. It was so difficult. And I think that we tried to read something. I don’t even know what.

But it wasn’t until afterwards I was exposed to Shakespeare at Temple University. I took a few classes in college and at the Walnut Street Theatre School. I think it was when I was cast in Twelfth Night at Theatre Rhinoceros.

BOGAEV: That was the first?

DOMINGO: That was the first, and I’m very glad it was because Danny Shea helped deconstruct what Shakespeare was in every single way, so much so that he took—he didn’t have Malvolio in the play. He was taking great stabs and conceptual stabs at Shakespeare and really helping us own it in our own way, which is beautiful.

So that’s the way I’ve come into my love of Shakespeare. “Oh, I can own it.” It can—this body, this lean, tall, Brown body can have ownership with Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: Just scrolling back, how did you even start acting?

DOMINGO: How did I start acting? It was… I took a couple classes in college, actually. And one of the classes I took, one of my teachers, Chris, pulled me aside one day. And it was just as an elective, because, I mean, honestly, I took this because I was actually incredibly shy and I wanted to take a class that sort of got me out of my comfort zone because I was a journalism student.

And then I took this class and my teacher said, “Have you ever thought about a career as an actor?” He said, “Because I think you have a gift.”

BOGAEV: What do you think he saw?

DOMINGO: I think he saw the observer, the person who sort of watched. The third child in my family, the one who watched his siblings be cool kids. And he was the nerdy kid, but he just watched.

He would go to family activities where many people were loud and boisterous. And he would sit in the corner and observe. But then I would go to my bedroom and I would play with Legos, and, you know, build things and read books about, you know, foreign places.

You know—they say a lot of actors, you have to pull from trauma and things like that. I had a pretty happy childhood. Do I have any darkness? I’m sure I do but I think I’m very feeling and I pull from empathy rather than trauma.

So, I would sit with my mother and have long conversations. I think she gave me the gift of teaching me to have empathy, to teaching me to be curious about people.

And I’m always telling students that that has to be a part of your work. You just have to have the curiosity in many things, many things that are outside acting, you know.

So he—I think he saw all of that. That I was an incredible observer and that I was able to apply it with character and story. And also the fact that I love research. Anything he gave me, I would like, you know, do a deep dive to try to figure it out and then apply it to my body and to action.

BOGAEV: Okay. So you got started on the acting path in college, and then later you went on auditions in San Francisco. And I just love this story that you tell about you’re on an audition and you chose one of Helena’s monologues from Midsummer.

DOMINGO: Oh yeah.

BOGAEV: And that is so great! That must have woken them up.

DOMINGO: Listen, there was something called the Bay Area Theater Auditions (or something). They were huge, and every casting director and every theater company would all, you know, go to these auditions, like hundreds of people.

You had to win a lottery to get a slot. So I got a slot and I thought, “Well, how will I actually introduce myself?” And it’s not like I did Helena. I did Helena’s monologue just like I was: this skinny, tall, Brown man. I wasn’t particularly feminine. I wasn’t trying to be feminine in any way.

Because I didn’t think of Helena—maybe that’s it—I’ve never thought of when it comes to gender that they have to play into anything. So I felt like, “No, I’m going to understand Helena’s heart and her story.” I connected with Helena.

BOGAEV: So you decided to do Helen’s speech because here you are as a…  pretty much, I would imagine all they would see maybe is this really tall, Black guy and you wanted to shake them out of that.

DOMINGO: No, I wanted them to imagine me as anything else. Imagine that I can do anything. And to help transform their mind, bend their mind, to look at the soul of a character and see me as Helena I thought that would be—I don’t know, I was kind of a bold actor at that early stage.

BOGAEV: It’s great. Did it work?

DOMINGO: Yeah, you know, it worked. Man, I killed it. I got many jobs after that. They felt, “Wow, I saw Helena. You taught me something else.”

But also I wanted to teach them how to see me. That was also something I was very conscious of early in my career. I was like, “No, I’m not going to allow you to pigeonhole me or tell me what roles I can play and cannot play. I’m going to tell you what I think of myself that I can. That I’m limitless.”

BOGAEV: Well, you did a ton of theater. You had a huge success with The Scottsboro Boys. You took it from conception to Broadway and all the way to the West End in London. But then you say, after that, you almost gave up acting.

DOMINGO: Yeah well, I thought I achieved what I was supposed to achieve. I’d been in the business for many years and then, you know, there’s a rollercoaster, you know, we all… artists out there, we all know that there’s a rollercoaster: highs and lows. You’re acting one day, you’re bartending the next, you’re teaching the next, you’re doing some commercials, and that’s the life of an artist. I never considered it a struggle. I just considered it the life of an artist.

And so I started to have some great career successes being nominated for a Tony award and an Olivier. I go to London and I do these beautiful shows. I do my own solo show at the Tricycle Theater.

And then I come back to New York and I start to audition for things that I thought honestly were—I was—I had moved away from those things. I thought that I—I don’t have an ego about work, I feel like you can get work in small things and large things, but I just felt like I was beyond that and I needed to make some different life decisions.

I was sort of moving into my mid-forties and I thought, Well, this just isn’t smart. I thought, maybe it’s time to do something else. Other job professions—you do some work, you get promotions, you get more promotions, you eventually become the CEO.

As an actor, you can go and do a show on the West End, get nominated for an Olivier, come back and you’re auditioning for an under-five role on a small television show. And you’re like, “That doesn’t make sense. I want to keep going.” But I didn’t have the right infrastructure, I think. So I was going to pull away. I was going to, actually, I used to do headshots, take pictures of my friends and colleagues.

BOGAEV: Oh, so that was a plan B.

DOMINGO: Yeah, that was my plan B. I had a great side business. You always got to have a few side hustles because I sort of like to… I like to eat well, and I like to have a good pair of shoes. So I always had—

BOGAEV: And you’re from Philly.

DOMINGO: And I’m from Philly. Listen, I got a hustle on all points. So I wanted to make sure that I, you know, I was taking care of myself. So my side hustle was going to become my profession. I was about to pull away and then I started to get auditions that actually worked and it transformed my life.

BOGAEV: Wow. Well, thank God it did. Listen, do you have any Shakespeare on your slate or a role you’d like to play next?

DOMINGO: Man, I feel like I want to maybe dive into some of the history plays. I feel like Henry V would be kind of cool. I feel like…

BOGAEV: A Richard?

DOMINGO: I think I would like to do a Richard. I think I would do Richard. I did so many of the, I guess, the comedies that I would like to play some kings.

BOGAEV: I would love to see your king. Actually, I’d watch it, watch you do anything. So I wish you all the best. Thank you so much.

DOMINGO: Oh, you’re so very welcome. Thank you.

——————-

BOGAEV: Actor, producer, playwright, and director Colman Domingo. Sing Sing opens in theaters starting on August 2.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer, with help from Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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