Colman Domingo thinks A’Ziah King is Homer. “She’s a modern day classical writer,” he submits from a sunny corner of the Bowery Hotel lounge in New York. “It’s looking at the American condition and the American psyche through these incredibly well-drawn characters and tropes.” The “it” he’s referring to is the Twitter epic that King, known to most internet-dwellers as @_zolarmoon, clacked out on a now infamous October day in 2015. The “Zola Story,” as it has come to be known, is the firsthand account of a series of outrageous events involving strippers, a Nigerian pimp, and “hoeism” that begins with a chance encounter at a Michigan Hooters and ends in a bloody shootout at a motel in central Florida.
The then-20-year-old King captured every lurid, preposterous detail of the experience in a series of 148 astonishing, irreverent, and astonishingly irreverent tweets. As these things tend to do, the story went viral, became the subject of a many-thousand-word magazine story, and has been adapted into a feature film directed by Janicza Bravo and starring Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun and Domingo.
Long before he was appearing in buzzy HBO shows like Euphoria and starring alongside the likes of Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis, Domingo was a working Bay Area Shakespeare actor who wasn’t sure Hollywood was even in the cards. In the late ‘90s, you might have caught him playing, as he describes it, “some other stupid criminal,” in a handful of episodes of Nash Bridges, but outside of that, he says the pickings were slim. “I’d go in for a role and they’re looking for someone named ‘Coolwhip Tyrell’…I wanted to give a full life to a character and they were just giving me these broad strokes of a trope.”
By 2015, Domingo was considering packing it in and committing his energy to a nascent headshot photography side hustle. “Here I am, in my early 40s and I’m seeing friends of mine who are doctors and lawyers getting houses; I’m still living like an artist.” With one foot out the door, he decided to give it one last go, hiring new management and a new agent. The move would prove to be a wellspring of new opportunities. Most prominent among them, his now signature role as “Victor Strand,” the mysterious conman in AMC’s long-running, post-apocalyptic drama Fear of the Walking Dead.
In Zola, the many shades of Colman Domingo culminate in a character as bifurcated as they come. The film follows the titular character, a 20-something waitress based on the real-life King, as she agrees to take an impromptu road trip from Detroit to Tampa with “Stefani”— a twin flame that she met just a day earlier, Derek — Stefani’s boyfriend, and “X”— Stefani’s “roommate.” The stated prompt of the trip is to make some quick cash stripping in Florida where the men are lonelier and their pockets are apparently deeper. It’s not long before Zola is being asked to have sex with strangers for money and X reveals himself to be not Stefani’s roommate, but, in fact, her pimp.
On his surface, X may seem like a reprisal of the petty criminals Domingo used to play, but peer through that single, hazel contact lens and you’ll glimpse something far richer. As the mercurial trafficker, Domingo is a slithering diamondback. He presents a cool, unbothered exterior, which only works to underscore the palpable sense of lurking danger, the knowledge of an imminent attack. “I made the choice to constantly throw people off,” Domingo tells me with a grin. “Just when you think he’s gonna be gentle, he’s gonna be violent. And just when you think he’s gonna be violent, he’s gonna smile.” In a scene toward the middle of the film, in seemingly a single breath, X goes from threatening mortal danger upon Zola in a growling, American baritone to answering a phone call with a cheery, Nigerian trill — “Ay, mama! How are you?”
Domingo credits some of the zaniness of his performance to the film’s idiosyncratic writers—“the film is weird because Janicza Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris are weird as fuck too”—and the freedom he was allotted by its director. “[Janicza Bravo] is a collaborator for the ages because she really said, ‘Colman what do you think and what do you want to bring to this character?’” The son of a working class Belizean immigrant, Domingo recognized the earnest immigrant strivings underpinning X’s seedy underworld maneuverings. “He’s just trying to get his money to get his things and have the American Dream like everyone else,” he explains. “This is his agency to get it. It’s a terrible, vicious, horrific way of getting it, but, at the end of the day, he wants what everyone else wants.”
Domingo can empathize with this mindset. As a black, gay multi-hyphenate talent long before that might’ve been something to put in your Instagram bio, he knows what it feels like to be denied the conventional access points. “I’ve always had to come through a backdoor or a crack in the wall,” he tells me. At 51, it seems the front door has finally unlocked for him. He’s landing bigger parts, directing more, and recently announced he’ll be adapting one of his plays into a new show for AMC.
When I ask what he thinks people can take away from Zola, Domingo cautions against moralizing. ”I hope this film is not sort of a morality tale. I feel like it’s a deconstruction of the American Dream.” He thinks the film could be taught in universities some day as an emblematic artifact of our time. “The demoralized white man who’s looking around, who’s a little rudderless; and then the immigrant who’s like, ‘Hey, I’m looking forward, I have things to do, I have direction’; the white girl who is set up as a pillar in our society, but she’s a victim of it and a perpetuator, understanding her power and agency; and then you have the black woman navigating this trepidatious territory.”
At the very least, Domingo hopes audiences recognize the way the narrow values of our country can push people to extremes. “It’s a 20 hour drive from Detroit to Tampa. First of all, that’s crazy.”
