Colman Domingo: Actor, Playwright, Director, Producer

Black History Month is a good excuse to talk about Colman Domingo, though any month would do. Actor, playwright, director, producer — he works every job in the building, and he has been at it long enough that the industry is only now catching up to what theater audiences knew years ago.

Born on November 28, 1969, Domingo built his early career on Broadway, with roles in the play "Well" (2005) and the musical "Passing Strange" (2008). Then came "The Scottsboro Boys" (2010), the final Kander and Ebb collaboration, which brought him a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination when the show opened in London. He can dance, too — he was nominated for the Fred Astaire Award for Best Principal Dancer on Broadway.

The film work stacked up alongside the stage work: Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," "42," "The Butler," and Ava DuVernay's "Selma," where he played the activist Ralph Abernathy. On television, he has played Victor Strand in AMC's "Fear the Walking Dead" since 2015, a part that grew into a series-regular job.

2020 put him in front of a wider audience. He drew acclaim as Cutler in Netflix's adaptation of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and attention as X in "Zola." Then came Ali in "Euphoria," a recovering addict written with unusual patience, which won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2022.

In 2023 he played the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in Netflix's "Rustin." The casting mattered. Rustin was an openly gay Black man pushed to the edges of the movement he helped build, and Domingo is an openly gay Black man who spent decades doing the work before Hollywood said his name out loud. The performance earned him Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Actor.

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He isn't slowing down. He stars as Mister in the movie-musical adaptation of "The Color Purple," directed by Blitz Bazawule, which drew good reviews and a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. He's set to play Joe Jackson in "Michael" (2025), the Michael Jackson biopic, and he'll direct and star in a Nat King Cole biopic — his turn behind the camera.

The writing never stopped, either. Domingo wrote the plays "Dot," "Wild with Happy," and "A Boy and His Soul," and produced "Fat Ham" on Broadway. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, passing the craft along to the next generation of artists.

Domingo's career took decades to look like an overnight success. He kept writing, kept acting, kept producing, and stayed openly himself the whole way through. That's the story worth telling during Black History Month — a long, stubborn body of work, built in every corner of the business, by a man who never hid who he was.