By When Colman Domingo was offered a part in Netflix's adaptation of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, he took a long, deep inhale. When he found out that it was celebrated director George C. Wolfe who would be at the helm, and that Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman had leading roles, he had heard enough. "I said, ‘How much more do you want me to say yes?" he recalls over Zoom from Los Angeles. "I really wanted to be in the room with these artists, knowing that Denzel Washington was taking on the feat of getting August Wilson’s words out there in cinema."
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom takes place over one afternoon in which Mother of the Blues Ma Rainey rehearses with her band in a recording studio in 1920's Chicago. Adapted from August Wilson's seminal play, Wolfe's taut screen reimagining retains the same sense of claustrophobia as the play, with action mostly confined to stifling rehearsal rooms and kept behind the locked doors.
Domingo's quiet but steady rise has seen him appear in films such as Ava Duvernay's Selma and Barry Jenkins's If Beale Street Could Talk. Earlier this month he earned rave reviews for his sublime performance in Euphoria's Christmas special, an episode that saw him go head-to-head with Emmy-winner Zendaya, and which Domingo told Esquire feels like a "sermon for 2020."
To prepare for playing Cutler, the band's trombone player who clashes against Boseman's character Levee, Domingo researched the Great Migration that African Americans undertook from the South, as well as listening to Ma Rainey's music and contemporaries of hers like Bessie Smith. "I also had conversations with family members," Domingo says. "My mother’s side of the family migrated from Alabama and Georgia just like a lot of the characters in the play. I wanted to find some authenticity about food and family and struggles and let that be a part of my DNA. That’s the beautiful thing about August Wilson’s work, so much of it that lives in you already and is part of your legacy."
The film has added significance as Chadwick Boseman's unexpected death earlier this year means that his performance as Levee is his last role in cinema, with Domingo noting the poetic justice of this performance being Boseman's swan-song, saying, "It felt like we were at our best". He recalls that in the first rehearsal they had together, Boseman looked at him over his trumpet and said, "Ooh brother I can't wait to dance with you". "It felt like we were in the boxing ring together sparring," Domingo says. "It required a lot of grace and a great sense of humour, and being willing to get it wrong."
There are two intense speeches given in the film which seem to mirror each other: the first as Levee delves into a dark story from his past and we see beneath his wise-cracking façade, and the second from Cutler as he tells the rousing story of Reverend Gates, a preacher who was humiliated by a group of white men. Each is delivered to an audience but they feel like a dialogue between Levee and Cutler as the two men wrestle with their differences.
"When you have a couple of people like that who are willing to leave it on the floor, that's when magic occurs," Domingo says of the filming the latter scene. "I think God is in the room in some way, and that's what any actor worth their salt is trying to achieve. I think we did that a few times."
Levee is provoked by Cutler's reverent speech, challenging his faith in God and giving examples of the hardships Black people suffer as evidence against God loving them. "I’m a very spiritual person, and so is Chad, and that language that August Wilson gives us is so vitriolic towards the ideology of God and his practises," he says. "It's scary even to say those words."
Domingo remembers seeing the words getting stuck in Boseman's throat and how he pushed him to keep going, after the director yelled cut both actors threw their arms around each other and sobbed. "We’re all wrestling with those questions of faith, especially right now when you look at the ills of the world," he says. "When that little crack of doubt comes into your heart and your mind you think, 'What if he’s right? What if God hates Black people?'. Levee provides the receipts, 'This happened to my mother, where was God?'. We have our music and our God and whatever you need to get up and out in the world, and this character comes in to smash a hole into that."
Wolfe has said the film is a metaphor for where America is right now, and this moment of faithlessness seems to echo a year in which Black people all over the world have suffered, during a pandemic which has disproportionately killed them or at the hands of the police. These crises of faith are something Domingo felt in the lead-up to the American Presidential election earlier this year, saying he, "started to have doubts and wonder if maybe we were meant to go to the dark side, but people are good and I don’t want to believe otherwise. I think the play holds that struggle out there in its bare hands."
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom oscillates between Black joy and Black pain, with the music offering both an expression of the long shadow cast by Jim Crow, and a release from that very suffering. Colman himself has appeared in searing works about racism like Selma, but also genre work like The Walking Dead and upcoming horror reboot Candyman, and he hopes that finally there is more nuance coming to the types of Black stories being told.
"I think that we’re sort of retraining audiences to see that you can have Black Panther and have If Beale Street Could Talk, it doesn't have to be one or the other," he says. "Think about it, Ma Rainey is an openly gay Blues musician in the 1920's. On paper that doesn’t sound profitable but her story is complex and she is a pioneer. Her story deserves to be told."
'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' is out 18 December
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