The Madness further cements Colman Domingo as one of his generation’s great actors

2024 is proving to be Colman Domingo’s year. The actor, who just turned 55, kicked it off with the kind of awards heat others dream of: In January, his work in The Color Purple (as the brutal “Mister”) and Rustin (as the Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin) nabbed him two Screen Actors Guild Awards mentions. And soon after, that latter film earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. The moment would have felt like a culmination of decades of hard work (and it was). But as has long been the case throughout his career, Domingo didn’t slow down.  

The Tony-nominated and Emmy-winning actor followed this up with turns in the soulful prison drama Sing Sing, about the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, and Ethan Coen’s madcap, pulpy, lesbian road-trip movie Drive Away Dolls. And now, with the release of Netflix’s limited series The Madness, the Philly-born actor is making the case for how ready he’s been for such a career turning point. Then again, for three decades now, Domingo has been putting in the work and creating those breakout roles for himself. Hollywood just keeps belatedly catching up.

There is something quite invigorating about watching Domingo positioned front and center in a TV series that knows how to use the actor’s versatility. In The Madness, he plays Muncie Daniels, a promising media pundit poised to get his own CNN show who gets framed for the murder of an infamous white supremacist figure who may or may not have had billionaire friends in high places. Written in the vein of North By Northwest, The Fugitive, and Double Jeopardy, this is a series that finds Domingo’s Muncie constantly on the run. He cannot seem to take a step anywhere without finding his story being rewritten right before his eyes, with planted proof conveniently showing up at his place of residence and possible leads mysteriously disappearing. Domingo, as it turns out, makes for a great everyman, mostly because his version of it is so rarely ordinary and is rooted in the actor’s canny ability to find the sublime in the mundane, the grandeur in the ordinary. His Muncie is both like and unlike any other guy around. There’s a thrill in watching Domingo, who is flexing all of his acting muscles here, milk Muncie’s angst at finding he’s become a main character in a story he’d rather not be a part of. 

The Madness constructs its central premise under a fascinating (and all too timely) proposition: a Black man in America, no matter how famous or educated or wealthy or well-connected, can be easily framed for murder by merely stoking racist fears of his seemingly inherent violence. Muncie Daniels is as respectable as they come. Yet a happenstance meeting with a white neighbor in the Poconos whom he soon finds dismembered leads to an on-foot chase and several news cycles where he finds that he’s now the number-one suspect. Muncie makes for a great fall guy precisely because he’s the kind of left-leaning villain the media cannot help but lap up and which the police and the public cannot help but buy into. 

Photo: AMANDA MATLOVICH/Netflix

As Muncie works his way through finding ways and allies to help him prove his innocence—in what turns out to be a bigger conspiracy than even he could’ve imagined—Domingo finds himself playing notes of the many characters he’s embodied in his long-running (though only recently hot-streak-riddled) career. In fact, Domingo was, at one point, the definition of a working actor, the kind of expression that feels like a putdown but should instead be understood as a career defined by consistency. 

If you were watching Nash Bridges in the late ’90s and any of the Law & Order series in the early 2000s, there’s a decent chance you caught Domingo in some of his earliest on-screen roles. These were bit parts fitting for an actor eager to work. Mostly, they were nothing roles with but a few lines of dialogue that helped move the plot of any given episode along. Domingo was featured in Nash Bridges on four separate occasions—and never in the same role. One minute you’d find him playing a cop who gets burnt to bits; next you’d see him getting arrested for wanting to score drugs. Likewise, on Law & Order (and its various spin-offs), he played, among others, an abrasive defense lawyer, a sassy gay bartender, and an elusive drug dealer.

With a pliant physicality that can just as easily suggest a towering authority figure or an unsettlingly slithering presence, it’s no surprise he found ways to book parts on the small screen as he flexed both his directorial and acting skills on the stage on both coasts. He may just have garnered bit parts on TV procedurals, but his theater resume is enviable, with enough Shakespeare and August Wilson productions on the West Coast that then helped him arrive on Broadway in such storied works as Passing Strange and The Scottsboro Boys—not to mention special performances of The Wiz (as part of the Encores! concert series), Guys And Dolls (at Carnegie Hall) and A Raisin In The Sun (in a one-night-only benefit reading). 

By the time he truly began breaking through in Fear The Walking Dead and later in Euphoria, two series that capitalized on the smooth sweet-talking Domingo could bring to the screen, wrapped as it was in a warm kind of menace, it was pretty clear the actor was in a league of his own. And it’s not just because he’d successfully built a career as an out gay Black man that found him handily shuttling between buzzy genre fare, prestige TV, and big-screen roles in Lincoln, Selma, If Beale Street Could Talk, Zola, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—all projects which, especially when considered in tandem, create a portrait of a career blooming after years of being nurtured and watered. If Domingo’s last decade feels like an arrival, it is only because many of us have been starved for the kind of star Domingo is: a ferociously empathetic performer who gets under his character’s skin and offers them up to us with such boldness that their textured humanity cannot help but shine through.

The Madness’ Muncie Daniels feels like a combination of all that has made Domingo such a transfixing screen presence. He can be calming and level-headed (it’s why Muncie makes such a great pundit) yet equally vicious when required. (How else can he be expected to survive when so many folks want him dead?) He can be a firebrand flirt when the scene requires it (like when he and his soon-to-be-ex wife go undercover at a swingers club) yet an irascible force (like when a cop riles him up during an obscenely baiting interrogation). He can be all loving warmth when need be (as when he rekindles his relationship with his eldest daughter) yet stern and steely when called to be (as when he needs to set his son straight about his pot use). And he does it all—or most of it, at least—wearing the most stylish midnight-blue peacoat you’ve ever seen. Muncie may not be as floridly fashionable as Domingo has shown himself to be on red carpets big and small, but he’s nevertheless often impeccably dressed. He’s a man who sells a specific vision of himself to the outside world but who also sees that vision slowly crumble around him faster than he can clear it on his own. 

This limited series covers a lot of thorny issues—conspiracy theories, the media-pundit ecosystem, white supremacy, domestic terrorism, dark-moneyed interest groups, and corruption at the highest levels—but its biggest effect might be further cementing Domingo as one of his generation’s greatest talents. The rumbling intensity that seems to always bubble underneath his characters, ready to be unleashed either with craven cruelty (as in The Color Purple, say) or honeyed empathy (as in Sing Sing), is weaponized here to tell a tale of what it means to get lost in someone else’s story—or in someone else’s game (and maybe even an entire country’s drama). And in allowing Domingo to dip in and out of all the various selves Muncie has known himself to be and those he needs to become to survive, The Madness makes for a worthy feather in the actor’s cap.

And once more, it feels like yet another beginning. One need only look ahead. In addition to returning for Euphoria’s third season, he’ll next be seen in Antoine Fuqua’s highly anticipated biopic, Michael, as Joe Jackson. He’ll also be heard in Joe and Anthony Russo’s sci-fi adventure The Electric State and the Disney+ animated series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (as Norman Osborn, no less). Oh, and he’s also working on his upcoming feature directorial debut: a biopic of Nat King Cole, in which he’ll also star. As ever with the increasingly prolific actor, this moment might look like a peak, but Domingo has been building out something of a mountain range.