Bradley Cooper and Colman Domingo take on Lincoln Center together
The South Philly actor, who recently became friends with West Philly native Domingo, has high praise for the 'Sing Sing' star.
NEW YORK — It was a very Philly morning at Lincoln Center’s Francesca Beale Theater where South Philly bred actor Bradley Cooper joined West Philly native Colman Domingo for a conversation after a screening of Sing Sing, where Domingo plays Divine G, an incarcerated playwright and actor who starts a theater program in Ossining, NY’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
Cooper, who was in the running for a best actor Oscar last year along with Domingo, was quick to compliment Domingo’s powerful performance and his collaboration with other formerly incarcerated actors in the film. The Maestro star is far from being the only fan. “My mother is from South Philly, 4′8″, hard as sh—, she couldn’t move after watching the film,” Cooper said about his mother, Gloria Campano, while recounting about the time when they watched Sing Sing together.
The conversation, which largely focussed on Cooper’s favorite scenes from the film, started with Cooper asking Domingo how this film is different from the others he has starred in.
“This is is different than anything I’ve done,” said Domingo, “but I also feel like all my years in regional theater, off-off-Broadway, off-Broadway, films — low budget, large budget, whatever. I feel like everything I’ve been doing led to this in many ways.”
Domingo, 55, a journalism major at Temple University, dropped out of school to pursue acting when he was 21. In 2009, his autobiographical play A Boy and His Soul — about a young Black man in 1980s Philadelphia “propelled by the beat of classical soul” — premiered off-Broadway.
“I was trying to marry my childhood coming of age and my new coming of age that I’m having now,” he said to The Inquirer in 2009.
Fifteen years on, the vulnerability that Domingo brings to his performance in Sing Sing is something Cooper was deeply appreciative of. Domingo in turn credited the film’s director Greg Kwedar for “keeping the camera lingering” and not jumping to end a shot. “It’s because it’s Colman Domingo!,” Cooper said.
In an extremely poignant scene in the film, Domingo’s character tells Clarence Maclin (played by Maclin himself) that Black men didn’t address each other by a racial slur. They call each other “beloved.” It was something Domingo learnt from Maclin through their conversations. “I am from West Philly, I used the n word all time. So that was beautiful,” he said.
The film, which Domingo called a “watershed experience,” questions the tropes of prison films and focuses on the brotherhood and camaraderie between the incarcerated actors as they stage Shakespearian tragedies, social satires, and seemingly unhinged comedies about Hamlet, gladiators, and Egyptian princes.
“I am glad I am alive at a time when you’re doing work. The sky is the limit for you,” Cooper said to Domingo, establishing just why their hometown is called the City of Brotherly Love.