Colman Domingo reveals how he wasn’t cast in Boardwalk Emp i re just because of his skin tone.

According to Variety, The Color Purple star told The New York Times that in 2014, when he was working on getting his screen career up and running, he was auditioning for what he called “under-fives,” roles that only give the actor between one to two lines of dialogue. One of those roles was for Boardwalk Empire. This particular role was one Domingo hoped would lead to bigger and better roles.

The role was to play a maître d’ at a Black nightclub, and Domingo showed he was overqualified by singing and tap dancing during the audition. But when his agent called with feedback from the producers, he heard that even though the producers loved his audition, the agent said that the historical researcher for the show told producers that maître d’s in Black nightclubs were generally lighter-skinned. Therefore, the producers passed on Domingo.

Domingo described how hard the news struck him.

“That’s when I lost my mind,” he said. He also told his agent, “I can’t take it anymore. I think this is going to kill me.”

Now, Domingo looked back on how far he’s come in his career, starring not only in The Color Purple, but also as Bayard Rustin in the Netflix biopic about the civil rights icon, Rustin.

“I became an actor that was ‘offer-only’ probably sooner than the industry thought I should have,” he said. “But I decided I have a body of work. You can go and look at it, you can ask other directors about me, and you can make me an offer or not.”

Evidence of his body of work is within how he approached Mister in The Color Purple. As he told us at Shadow and Act in the above interview, he approached the character from the position of learning how damaged people go on to damage others.

“I was very conscious to understand how hurt people hurt people. I had to first find every single reason to love about Mister. What do I love about him, what do I find human? He has dreams, needs, desires like anybody else–what happens when you don’t get that? What happens when you…unconsciously make decisions to abuse others?” he said to Shadow and Act Managing Editor Trey Mangum. “He’s trying to feel stronger and have more size in the world. Maybe he doesn’t feel like he has agency in the world. For me, it’s a lot of questions around his psyche and why do people do what they do?”

“The arc of the film is that everyone starts to evolve, but he’s stuck in his own prison of toxic masculinity, of misogyny, he doesn’t have words for it, he doesn’t even know to have nuance, to be tender,” he continued. “It’s looking at that trope of a of that time [when] the world is changing around him but he’s so stuck in this idea and it’s a lot of things that go that.”

The Color Purple is now showing in theaters.

Boardwalk Empire

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