How many action-movie actors have a résumé that reads like this?: Emmy winner, Oscar and Tony nominee, Met Gala co-chair, fragrance ambassador, drag diva in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Tears” video and husband to Raúl, who he cruised at a Walgreens.
The résumé in question belongs to Colman Domingo, and that mosaic précis is what he brings to “The Running Man,” Edgar Wright’s reimagining of Stephen King’s dystopian 1982 novel and the Arnold Schwarzenegger-led thriller adaptation that followed. Wright’s film (in theaters) stars Glen Powell as a working-class father who’s cast on “The Running Man,” a hit game show that pits on-the-run contestants against assassins in a kill-or-be-killed cross-country hunt with a $1 billion prize.
Domingo plays Bobby T, the show’s popular, smooth-talking host, a role originally played by Richard Dawson, the host of the real-life game show “Family Feud,” in the 1987 Schwarzenegger film. Domingo said that going high octane gave him a chance to flex his Billy Flynn pedigree.
“I’ve never played a showman role in a film,” Domingo, 55, said in a recent phone interview. “People know me recently doing more heart-wrenching dramas, and I thought, this gives me a chance to go back to my Broadway roots, where I was known for being more showy. It was nice to pull out those muscles again.”
About those awards: Domingo won his Emmy in 2022 for his performance as Ali in “Euphoria.” His Oscar nominations are for his turns as the title civil rights leader in “Rustin” (2023) — which made him only the second openly gay man to be nominated for playing a gay character — and as John Whitfield, an incarcerated man in a theater ensemble in “Sing Sing” (2024). In 2011, he earned a Tony nomination for “a grisly rogue’s gallery” of roles, as this newspaper put it, in the Broadway musical “The Scottsboro Boys.”
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