If you ever get the chance to have breakfast with Colman Domingo, you must: he’ll arrive at Café Chelsea in New York right on time – impeccably turned out in a cherry-red windbreaker and crisp white T-shirt, sunglasses on, too many gold rings to count – and playfully pour your coffee as if you were old friends. Amid the murmur of power players in the swanky French bistro, he exudes a disarming warmth.
At 55, Domingo appears genuinely at ease, not unlike his role as Ali Muhammad, the truth-telling NA sponsor who befriends Zendaya’s agitated Rue Bennett, in the HBO series Euphoria. He is in New York for The Kelly Clarkson Show and a cocktail reception to fête Indhu Rubasingham’s appointment as artistic director of London’s National Theatre; tomorrow, there’s the photoshoot for HTSI, then it’s back to Los Angeles, where he’ll finish shooting the pop biopic Michael with director Antoine Fuqua. He’s so busy that “I’m not even gonna see my own show this time,” says the Philadelphia native, referring to Lights Out: Nat “King” Cole, the off-Broadway play he co-wrote with Patricia McGregor, which recently finished after a debut run at the New York Theater Workshop. “I love that I have this relationship with New York now.”
