[This story contains major spoilers from the finale of The Madness.]
This has been Colman Domingo’s year. The Euphoria star received a best actor Oscar nomination — his first-ever — for his portrayal of civil rights hero Bayard Rustin in Rustin, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama. He’s tracking to land another best actor nod for his acclaimed drama Sing Sing, based on a real-life prison theater program; and his eight-episode conspiracy thriller series The Madness, his first as a leading man, dropped Thanksgiving Day on his 55th birthday.
In The Madness, Domingo plays the charming Muncie Daniels, a CNN pundit and Philadelphia native who stumbles upon a murder and is blamed for it. On the wild ride to clear his name — of killing a white supremacist, at that — Muncie must first rein in his ego and make personal amends with his estranged wife Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake), teenage son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham), his first child whom he abandoned because it didn’t fit the optics. Still, to become the father he needs to be, Muncie has to confront his own troubling memories of an activist father who ended up in prison for acting on his beliefs.
Not knowing who is after him and why makes Muncie unsure of what moves to make and who to trust, leading to shaky alliances with the murder victim’s wife Lucie (Tamsin Topolski) and FBI agent Franco Quinones (John Ortiz), neither of whom he’s sure he can fully trust. And just when he thinks he might be home free, a new obstacle in Julia Jayne (Alison Wright) is presented, and she is not afraid to kill. Even worse, there’s a billionaire mastermind (Neal Huff) also in the mix who has the public on his side. In the face of all these substantial obstacles, Muncie has two secret weapons — his good friend and lawyer Kwesi (Deon Cole) and Isiah (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a friend of his father’s who has known him since he was a boy. Even when they disagree with him, neither one of them will turn their backs on him.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Domingo to talk about becoming Muncie Daniels, leading a show set in his hometown, how he feels about The Madness in a Trump 2.0 world — and if he’s interested in doing a second season after not getting on that plane.
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What made The Madness a good first series for you to lead and Muncie a character you wanted to play?
Everything about it. It deals with all the things we’re thinking about right now in our culture and politics. Muncie Daniels is sitting in a seat where he’s very centrist in his views, and he is given this horror story of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he has to get out into the world to sort things out. I’m a person who believes that you have to get into the world, and you have to talk to other people and people who don’t believe in what you believe in to get to a new belief. So I felt like I understood Muncie in many ways. I felt like he’s taking a journey many people need to take right now to actually sort out all this disinformation, to actually form allies, sometimes with people you think you have nothing in common with. It really is just an everyman’s journey [of someone] who’s thrown into extraordinary circumstances.
How was filming this project set in your hometown?
That was amazing. We filmed most of the series in Toronto, but I knew we were doing some exteriors in Philadelphia and New York. And when they said we’re going to do some exteriors in Philly, I said, “Well, we gotta go to the real Philly. We gotta go to West Philly.” We shot, literally, part of the running montage past my childhood home and, also, in the park. In one of the episodes, there’s a park that me and Elena are in, and that’s actually my childhood park that I used to go to that was literally across the street from my elementary school. We even had a few background [actors] that were some of my childhood friends. They were just deep background.
What kind of preparation did you do? Because Muncie in the first episode, he’s…
He’s doing the most. He’s doing the entire most. I had to go through training for Jiu Jitsu. That was one of the first things, and hand-to-hand combat and also gun work. I did some of that work on Fear of The Walking Dead. And I’m used to doing physical work, but I hadn’t gone in like that, especially with Jiu Jitsu, which, actually, I really took to very quickly because for me it’s like choreography, taking me back to my Broadway stage days. So that was really cool. I love anything that’s athletic and anything and challenging. I loved every challenge. And also knowing that Muncie was pretty much in every frame over the first four to five episodes, I knew that I had to really have stamina and have discipline, not only to do the physical work, but also the vocal work.
Muncie can be very frustrating, especially when he seems blind to the very real obstacles facing him as a Black man.
That’s another thing that I was very curious about with Muncie, because of where he was sitting. A lot of folks, and I don’t think I’m this way, but I think a lot of times you start to insulate yourself and [end up] being in a bubble. That’s why he has his wife, his very, very Black wife and she’s like “wait a minute, so you went over there to this white man’s house to do what?” And it’s almost like, not that he forgot, but he’s been walking in his own rare air that he forgot he could be a target. And, at the end of the day, if you strip away his position, his power, his money, you see what a Black man is treated like in the world.
So talk about his relationship with Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake), his estranged wife. Why exactly are they estranged? Because it really is not made clear in the series.
That’s the beautiful thing. Actually, we made an agreement on the fact that we don’t even need to know exactly what went on in the relationship or why they’re not together. We thought it would be stronger to make it something existential, that they’re just in very different places in their lives. They met at a time when Muncie was an activist, and they were out there, probably in these streets together, trying to do good for people. And then Muncie has sort of elevated himself up to being a college professor and a CNN pundit and they just seem to be in very different places and have very different needs in the world. So I think that’s what’s pulling them apart. And Marsha Stephanie Blake, who I love so much, who plays Elena, we did some work to make sure that we always felt that there was still love, there was still attraction between each other, that she just wasn’t feeling him. (Laughs)
Give us some insight into Muncie as a father to both his teenage son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and his older daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham)?
Well, he’s kind of absent in many ways when we first meet him. I think that he’s present in his son’s life, yet he’s not really connecting with him. His son has very different needs than what Muncie can provide and a different way of being as a young Black man in the world and Muncie is trying to inspire him to do something different, instead of acknowledging where he needs to be and where his son needs to be. And then he’s sort of been an estranged father to his grown daughter, and that was basically because he made some choices early on in his life. He had a kid with one of his first girlfriends, and then made choices to have a very different life, and that left that young girl without a father. So, he’s trying to do some repair, but he doesn’t even know how to get in there and do the repair. And she’s tough, which I love. Gabrielle Graham is fantastic playing her. And she was actually vocal coached by my niece. Gabrielle is from Canada, and [my niece] said, “If she wants to talk to me, I got her.” I put them on the phone; they could not stop working together to the point that I feel like Gabrielle Graham took on some aspects of my own niece. So she does feel like family to me.
Maybe part of the problem Muncie has with Demetrius, especially early on, is a lot of times he’s trying to be his friend to kind of have one up on Elena.
Absolutely. I think he’s trying to find his way in with his son, but he doesn’t really know how to be a father. He’s failing at being a father when we first meet him. And part of the discovery and journey of The Madness is for him to actually get more tools to actually hear his son, acknowledge his son’s feelings, or his son’s rage, or what his son sees in the world as injustice, and how to go about it. It’s almost as if his son [Demetrius] was Malcolm X and Muncie was Martin, and they have to find a middle ground together.
You’re a theater guy, so how huge was it to work with Stephen McKinley Henderson who plays Isiah? And then there’s also Deon Cole.
Stephen McKinley is a legend. Everything about Stephen McKinley is grounded from head to toe, so you just have to be on your best game and really just deliver. Because he’s just grounded. He starts at a very grounded place so it grounds your performance as well. And Deon Cole, we worked together very briefly on The Color Purple, and I knew when they were talking about Muncie’s best friend and attorney [Kwesi], it’s got to be someone who sort of brings Muncie home. And Muncie is in CNN offices, you name it, he’s code switching all day, and this is his college buddy, this is somebody who can actually be his most raw self with without a filter. When we settled on Deon Cole, I thought, “Oh, Deon will give me everything I need. I would believe that friendship in every single way.” Deon is fantastic. People know him as such a great comedian, but he’s an incredible dramatic actor.
The Madness co-showrunner VJ Boyd said it was important to surround Muncie with other Black people.
Absolutely, so we know the world he lives in. I think it’s an easy trope to actually isolate him and not really deal with his Blackness. But that’s something everyone was very conscious to do to make sure that we knew he was absolutely 100 percent a very complex Black man in the world.
Talk about the very formidable villain Julia Jayne, played by Alison Wright.
Oh Julia Jayne, Woo. Oh my God. Alison plays opaque like no one else. You can never know what she’s thinking or feeling as a character. And Alison herself is very warm. She’s warm and funny and weird in all the good ways, but she knows how to play icy cold. Doing scene work with her is a joy because she volleys with you in such a unique way, like she’s looking behind your eyes, and like she’s three steps ahead of you.
And then there’s the relationship Muncie has with Franco Quinones played by John Ortiz.
John Ortiz is wonderful. I’ve been a fan of John Ortiz back from New York theater days because he was part of the LAByrinth Theater Company. And so when I knew that he was cast, I couldn’t have been more excited. I think he’s just such a tremendous actor with a great heart. He just has an incredible work ethic. I had a blast working with him.
Oh, and we can’t forget Muncie’s tie to Mark Simon’s wife Lucie (Tamsin Topolski).
She’s a character he believes he has nothing in common with. He has so many ideas and opinions about her from [her] being part of this white supremacist group, and this woman is actively doing work to disavow that and be something different. So he’s meeting her when she’s at a crossroads. And he forms an ally in her in a way that he probably never would imagine they would’ve.
Talk about Muncie realizing that he’s not that much different from his father.
He thought he was doing things in a different way. But isn’t that something that history teaches us that no matter what you’re still doing things the exact same way. It’s just that it looks a little different, or you think you’re so different. You know we always try to get away from, ‘oh, I don’t want to be nothing like my mother or my father.’ And then you end up saying the same things just like they do. [laughs] It feels like that’s exactly what it is. It’s really examining familiar relationships and history and how sometimes you can’t run from that. Instead of saying, “Oh, I don’t want to be like [them],” you have to examine who they are and then make conscious decisions to actually do the work to not be like [them].
And why didn’t Muncie get on that plane and escape all the drama? For a lot of people, he picked the wrong time not to run away.
Not the wrong time! (Laughs) You know what he decided, because in his history he’s always run away, that now he thought, “I need to confront this head on and figure out a new way.” For me, that’s Muncie’s literal turnaround and his new breakthrough. So he’s, “Let me meet this head on and go harder and go stronger.”
Did you find any of The Madness triggering, especially with the Elon Musk-esque Rodney Kraintz (Neal Huff) billionaire guy?
(Laughs) Funny thing is, it wasn’t triggering when we were [filming] it, but now it feels like it’s really a sign of the times [because] it’s really questioning a lot of things that are happening right now. We filmed this a year and a half, two years ago, and so the idea that we were already thinking about what was in the zeitgeist, for what I think our showrunners VJ Boyd and Stephen Belber were interested and curious about, is what’s behind door Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6? Who’s actually pulling the strings? Who’s actually sowing these seeds of disinformation? So they were already wanting to raise all these questions. And it’s amazing that when it’s now come to this moment when [the series is on the air] that these are the questions we all have right now.
Do you see a Madness 2 for you?
I hope so. Madness is a show I really enjoyed. I think there’s more story for Muncie and his family. I think now that they’ve had all these sort of huge life lessons, I’d be interested to take them out in the world and make them these modern-day, everyday superheroes who are just coming together as a family to work on things that affect the world or affect some change in some way. I feel like we need to take them to Europe and see what happens with this family.
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All eight episodes of The Madness are now streaming on Netflix. Read THR‘s interview with showrunners VJ Boyd and Stephen Belber.
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