Interview: Colman Domingo, the 32-Year Overnight Sensation Comes Into His Own with ‘Rustin’ [VIDEO]

Whether you know him from Fear the Walking Dead, If Beale Street Could Talk, Make*a*Circus in San Francisco, or his Emmy-winning turn in Euphoria, you’ve seen Colman Domingo on the small and big screen for years, decades even.

Domingo is aware he has a classic ‘oh, that guy!’ star quality but finally with Rustin he gets to step into the spotlight in his first lead role in a major motion picture in his 30+ year career. Bringing the story of Bayard Rustin to the big screen was its own breakthrough, one 60 years in the making. The architect behind the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin was virtually erased from the history books despite being the lead organizer of the event that pushed his close friend, Martin Luther King, Jr. into the mainstream of the 1960s civil rights movement.

In our conversation, Domingo details working with George C. Wolfe once again after 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the director’s legendary lineup of actors for Rustin that includes Glynn Turman, Audra McDonald, CCH Pounder and Jeffrey Wright. He opens up about her discovered who Bayard Rustin was, the importance his story gets to be told, the eerie timeliness of civil rights continuing to be not only up for debate but on the legal chopping block, and his optimism for the future.

Rustin is currently in select theaters also available to stream on Netflix.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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