One Nightstand With Colman Domingo

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Even when you’re as successful as Colman Domingo — an Emmy winner who became the first actor since Denzel Washington to receive back-to-back Best Actor Oscar nominations for his work in Rustin and Sing Sing — it still feels good to get praise from your peers, especially when it’s in relation to one of TV’s toughest gigs: hosting SNL. “I got the most beautiful compliments from Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, the Mount Rushmore of comedians and SNL,” says the 56-year-old actor, who ran into the trio at an AFI event honoring Murphy. “They all sang my praises, and I feel like I'm still floating over it.”

Although Domingo describes the SNL experience as “like being shot out of a confetti cannon in a week,” his success should be surprising to nobody. With a background in theater and an ability to vacillate between comedy and emotional depth in an instant, few actors have his range, and even fewer do it so damn stylishly. Domingo, a co-chair of the 2025 Met Gala, plans to attend next week’s event wearing custom Valentino by Alessandro Michele, the sketch of which he sent to Anna Wintour for her thoughts. “We're texters,” he says of their friendship. “She gets back right away. We've become very close friends. I really adore her. She's always very busy, and of course she's all around the world and she's in meetings and doing all these incredible things, but she's got time to text her friends.”

The Gala will be the coda to a few weeks spent in promotional mode for Michael, a Michael Jackson biopic in which he plays Jackson family patriarch Joe Jackson, as well as the third season of Euphoria. The former, he says, “was not an easy movie to make.” This was partly logistical — “it took maybe a year and a half, which is very long” — but also the weight of the story itself, to which Domingo was laser focused on bringing a different perspective.

“I was on board as an actor to say, ‘You know what, this is my lens into Joe Jackson,’ who is such a formidable character in most people's imagination,” he says. “But when you think about it, they just know sort of like the paint-by-numbers version of a person, and my job is to create a human being and not sort of this cartoon villain that people have imagined Joe to be.”

To do so, Domingo drew from his own life. “My stepfather, who had a seventh-grade education, was a part of a generation growing up pre-civil rights who believed his job as a man was to be the provider,” says Domingo. “When he came home, he changed the whole energy of the house. It was soft and warm and fuzzy and dancing and joyful, but when he came home and your chores had better been done, your homework better be done. He was the task master.” This sometimes led to difficult feelings, ones which now make sense. “When I was growing up, at times I thought, ‘I don't think he likes me,’” says Domingo. “But he didn't like me, he loved me.”

Such emotional complexity has become his signature, and Domingo is aware that this complexity will elicit difficult reactions from watchers, though it’s something he’s used to after three seasons on Euphoria. “I didn't know that it would smash the zeitgeist like it has, but I did know that it was something special,” he says. “Sam Levinson is one of the greatest showrunners, creators, directors I think that we have. He's so inventive and collaborative and he really has given us material that I think that we would rarely get.” Levinson wrote the role of Ali, sober sponsor to Zendaya’s Rue, specifically for for him. “He knew what I could do and he knew that I could deliver, but I hadn't been getting work like that for a long time.”

Nevertheless, the pressure of being on a show which drives conversation to the level Euphoria does is real. “I'm a bit more seasoned in my years and experience, so I know how to distill it and put up boundaries,” he says. “I think some of our younger cast probably have struggled from time to time, and they're working through it. We do have some that have been child stars and they've learned to navigate this industry, which is tricky because the world wants a lot of you. And the more successful you are, I think it is also an opportunity to try to tear you down.”

Domingo, though, remains ebullient on the payoff coming at the end of the season. “I almost wish it came out all at once because I feel like it's hard to digest where it's going because each episode is its own film,” he says. “They're isolated films, but it will all make sense when you get to the end.”

Keep reading to discover four of Domingo’s favorite books.

Domingo’s first pick is Theater Kid by Jeffrey Seller, a memoir by the Broadway producer behind hits including Rent, Avenue Q, and Hamilton. Domingo has long admired Seller, who gifted the actor a copy of his book. “I think it's actually rare in American theater to have a great creative producer,” he says. “You have a lot of producers who may fund and support, but not someone who's doing great critical thinking as an audience member and as a theater lover and just trying to make the piece what it should be.”

Before Hamilton moved to Broadway, Domingo attended one of the musical’s first performances at the Public Theater. “I sat there shook,” he says. “It was a surprise for us: casting, dance, use of language, movement. You just think, ‘Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius and Tommy Kail and all his collaborators.’ They trust you to distill this history and then transform it with all these people of color and all this movement and all things that are sort of colloquial and really consume it and digest American history in a new way. And feel like I'm a part of the story, and the story really is about all of us.”

His second selection is Hollywood, a 1974 memoir by playwright and screenwriter Garson Kanin given to Domingo by John Turturro. “I love the insider's point of view to a Hollywood of bygone years and I love that they're incisive and like real scenes,” he says.

Although Domingo has, at times, felt like an outsider, he now finds himself at the center of multiple industries. “I have become a bit of an insider when it comes to other theater and when it comes to film and television. So I work with everyone,” he says. “I feel like in a strange way, I'm sort of a through line throughout this industry. I've come from the theater world and I'm deeply embedded in television and film. I'm sort of a connector with these worlds and with the fashion world and with the art world as well.”

Domingo read his third choice, the autobiographical novel Pimp by Iceberg Slim, in preparation for playing X — “a dastardly dastardly pimp”— in the movie Zola. “I did so much research on the psychology of pimps, of human trafficking, all of that. And I think I was drawn to it because I'm like, ‘It's so not me.’ I'm such a feminist,” he says. “But I wanted to get into their psychology, and this had me shook.”

Domingo keeps his fourth and final selection The Hinterland: Cabins, Love Shacks and Other Hide-Outs, a gorgeous architecture book featuring homes nestled in nature around the world, by his bedside. “It's a bit of fantasy and whimsy and it's something that I think we all need as an escape. It's a relationship to nature and it's about sort of stripping things down and having something that's simple, yet very luxurious and beautiful.”

Ten years after purchasing the book, he’s found his own peaceful enclave. “I live in Malibu in the canyon and I have a view in the distance of the ocean. I listen to roosters crowing in the morning. I am surrounded by the Santa Monica mountains, and it's a bit of paradise. For me, to restore is in nature. I always thought I would only find a place like this in the Fjords or something like that. I thought it’s going to have to be somewhere not in America, but that's not the truth. I found it here.”

His only stipulation for finding his place in the world? “It's got to be 15 minutes from a good steakhouse.”

Watch the full episode below: