Colman Domingo has been directed by his fair share of legends, from Steven Spielberg and Ava DuVernay to George Wolfe and Steven Soderbergh. What he’s gleaned from the greats is the necessity of an overarching sense of trust — i.e., talented individuals should be encouraged to do the job that they’ve been hired to do.
“That’s what I want to do with my entire cast and crew,” says Domingo, who sat in the director’s chair for his Netflix series, The Four Seasons, for the first time in season two. “I want people to make choices and come with ideas and decisions.”
An actor by training, Domingo became a director out of circumstance. While pursuing his decades-long theater career, he often would mount his own productions, finding himself in several key positions other than performer. “I had to figure out how to get into the room when I had no access to being in a room, when people wouldn’t allow me to be in the room,” he says. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be a producer or director.”
His onscreen directing credits include episodes of his long-running AMC horror series Fear the Walking Dead and an episode in season one of The Four Seasons. Now, he is behind the camera for The Four Seasons‘ second-season premiere episode, “Hiking,” which sees the return of the comedy drama’s central gaggle of middle-aged friends: show creator Tina Fey, Will Forte, Marco Calvani, Kerri Kenney-Silver and Domingo. The group is back together for the first time since the season one finale, in which Erika Henningsen’s 30-something Ginny reveals she’s pregnant by Steve Carell’s recently deceased character, Nick, also the soon-to-be ex-husband of Kenney-Silver’s Anne before his demise. (The show is much funnier than this dark synopsis suggests.)
