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“Most of my work is about jumping off cliffs together,” says Colman Domingo. The 54-year-old Philadelphia native got his start in such bold theater projects as Passing Strange and The Scottsboro Boys and became famous thanks to boundary-pushing film and TV projects like Zola and Euphoria. “You can’t do work like [that] without believing you’ve taken a great leap of faith with some comrades. You don’t know if it’s going to be spectacular, but you know at least there’s great integrity and a great pull to do something unique.”
That faith is exactly what Domingo put in Greg Kwedar, the director of Sing Sing, as Domingo tells me on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast. Kwedar first approached him about the film when there was no finished script, and Domingo had just a three-week break in his schedule to complete the shoot.
Set in Sing Sing prison and following a season of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts theater program, the script for Sing Sing was written by Kwedar and Clint Bentley in collaboration with John “Divine G” Whitfield and Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, whose unlikely friendship inspired the film.
Both formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing, the two men became friends through the theater program. Maclin plays himself in the film, a powerful supporting turn opposite Domingo as Divine G; many of the supporting roles are played by former members of the program (the real Divine G appears in a brief cameo).
It’s not a documentary, but Domingo calls it a “hybrid of a film,” and credits his co-stars for inspiring him to be open as a performer. “There was nothing for me to hide behind and actually get the job done,” he says. “My job was to liberate myself.”
This week’s episode also includes my conversation with Gold Derby’s digital director Chris Rosen, in which we try to predict what will happen during next Wednesday’s Emmy nominations and see a few surprises coming as well. Chris’s full Emmy predictions are online if you want to test them against what actually happens next week.
