Ah, yes! The library!” Colman Domingo lights up at the word. The 53-year-old star of Fear the Walking Dead and Euphoria is standing in the corridor of a central London hotel, eager to escape the warren of pleasantly furnished but slightly soporific private rooms in which we find ourselves. It was in libraries, he tells me later, that he first explored his love of storytelling, the creative impulse that would steer him towards a career in entertainment. (“I’d make little film strips and things like that… the library’s where you could always find me.”) We could hardly pick a better place to stave off his jetlag.
Domingo has flown into the country for a few days to promote his new film, Rustin. Released on Netflix last week, the biopic is set in the build-up to the iconic 1963 March on Washington, the rally at which Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin dedicates itself to the nitty-gritty of civil rights organising, and features a coruscating lead performance by Domingo, playing Bayard Rustin – a brilliant and important activist whose role in the civil rights movement has historically been under-acknowledged. When I ask why this is, Domingo pulls me up. “Not under-acknowledged. Erased,” he says. “It was erased because he was openly gay.
