This Saturday in Los Angeles, the Academy Museum Gala hands out its biggest honors, and amidst the Charlize Therons and the John Carpenters stands the man gay Twitter has long declared every kingdom’s rightful king: Colman Domingo, recipient of this year’s Vantage Award. Taylor Swift is performing at the thing. So yes, the man who spent decades being described as “that guy from that thing” is now officially the guy Taylor Swift sings near. The come-up is complete.
So, who is he? Wrong question. What isn’t he?
Domingo is the rare actor whose IMDb page reads like a hostage situation for his agent’s calendar. Broadway pedigree (Passing Strange, a Tony-nominated turn in The Scottsboro Boys), a searing Emmy-winning role as Ali on Euphoria, five seasons of scheming gloriously as Victor Strand on Fear the Walking Dead, scene-stealing in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola, The Color Purple — and that’s before we get to the movies that made the Academy notice.
In 2024 and 2025, he collected back-to-back Best Actor Oscar nominations: first as civil-rights titan Bayard Rustin in Rustin, a role so physically transformed and so ferociously charming it briefly made Netflix’s awards team believe, then as Divine G in Sing Sing, where he led a cast of formerly incarcerated actors in a prison-theater drama that left audiences weeping into their popcorn. Two BAFTA nominations came along for the ride. Somewhere in there he also found time to host, produce, narrate, and appear at roughly every awards show front row in custom Valentino, because Colman Domingo does not believe in idle hands.
The 2026 slate is frankly rude
Most actors would rest. Domingo apparently treats rest as a personal insult. This year alone: he played Joe Jackson — patriarch of pop’s most complicated family — in Antoine Fuqua’s Michael biopic, premiered Dead Man’s Wire at Venice, shows up in Disclosure Day, and is prepping his feature directing debut: a Nat King Cole project he’ll direct, co-write, AND star in. Naturally. Later this month he also picks up the President’s Award at the NAACP Image Awards, because apparently one trophy per fortnight is his maintenance dose.
The Vantage Award, for the record, honors an artist whose work “advances the art and science of film” — which is a very polite way of saying the Academy Museum finally clocked what the rest of us have known since Ali first handed Rue a pep talk. The man makes everything he touches better. Put him in a biopic, he’s the reason you cry. Put him on a red carpet, he’s the reason your fave’s stylist has anxiety.
The love story we don’t deserve
If you need the romantic lore: Domingo met his husband Raúl in 2005 after the two locked eyes at a Walgreens, Raúl went home and posted a missed-connections ad on Craigslist — yes, Craigslist — and somehow in the era of dial-up thirst, that actually worked. They married in 2014, and Raúl now produces alongside him. Two decades in, they remain one of Hollywood’s most disgustingly well-dressed, genuinely wholesome couples, which is precisely the energy a man playing Joe Jackson needs to offset the darkness.
Also, he almost joined a cult
In a recent podcast appearance, Domingo casually revealed that during his starving-artist years he very nearly got recruited into a cult in Mexico City. He didn’t, which — given that his backup plan at the time was probably “become the greatest character actor of his generation,” now seems like the correct career move. It’s the perfect Domingo anecdote: even the cult couldn’t keep up with his workload.
So Saturday night, while Taylor Swift performs and the Academy Museum writes him a very large check of institutional respect, remember that Colman Domingo got here the long way: Craigslist missed connections, off-Broadway sweat, twenty years of “that guy from that thing,” and one relentless refusal to be boring. The king is merely being coronated. He’s been ruling for years.
