Colman Domingo: The Last Global Export America Didn’t Have to Bomb Anyone to Sell

The Colman Domingo Doctrine: How One Actor’s Rise Explains Everything Wrong (and Right) with the Planet

By the time Colman Domingo accepted his BAFTA in February, the planet had already tallied two new wars, three currency collapses, and one rogue AI that tried to unionize itself. Yet the global press corps abandoned the carnage for roughly ninety seconds to watch a 54-year-old Philadelphian thank his dialect coach in three languages—none of them English. That, dear reader, is soft power in the age of perpetual crisis: if the missiles must fly, at least let them fly over a red-carpet livestream.

Domingo’s current ubiquity—Oscar-nominated for Rustin, Emmy-nipped for Euphoria, Tony-snubbed but still standing—has become a convenient parable for the international order. He is the rare American export that doesn’t require drone accompaniment, a walking rebuttal to every State Department briefing that insists cultural diplomacy died with jazz. From Lagos salons streaming Zola to Seoul karaoke bars murdering “Ma Rainey” monologues, his baritone has become the unofficial soundtrack of late-capitalist insomnia. If you can’t afford eggs, at least you can still hum along.

The numbers, because we must: Rustin played in 42 countries, grossing modestly everywhere except France, where it inexplicably outperformed Mission: Impossible 47. Netflix’s global viewing dashboard reports Euphoria clips dubbed in Turkish and Tagalog have been watched 1.7 billion times—roughly the population of humans who still believe democracy is a going concern. Even the pirates have standards: torrents of Domingo’s Lincoln Center performance of The Garden are tagged “please seed, art matters.” Somewhere in Kyiv, a teenager is memorizing his Selma monologue between air-raid sirens; somewhere in Caracas, a barber is practicing the precise fade Domingo wore in Candyman. Soft power, meet hard necessity.

Of course, there is the obligatory backlash. Italian critics complain he is “too American,” which is rich coming from the country that gave us three separate Berlusconi resurrections. Chinese censors trimmed Rustin’s gay ballroom scenes for “aesthetic brevity,” a euphemism so elegant it could run for office. Meanwhile, the British press—ever nostalgic for empire—has spent months interrogating whether his accent work constitutes “cultural appropriation,” a charge they never leveled at their own ancestors when they appropriated entire continents. The irony, naturally, is lost on them.

What makes Domingo geopolitically interesting is not talent—talent is cheap; TikTok will sell you sixteen kinds before breakfast—but durability. He has survived an industry that devours its young and recycles the bones into limited-series content. While streaming CEOs publicly weep about quarterly losses and privately green-light algorithmic sludge, Domingo keeps booking prestige projects the way other people collect passport stamps. If Netflix is the Roman Empire, he’s the aqueduct still functioning after the barbarians have come and gone.

And yet the cynic’s case: his triumph arrives precisely as the global south drowns and the global north argues about pronouns. There is something obscene in celebrating one man’s ascent while COP29 delegates haggle over the precise temperature at which the Maldives become a memory. Still, that’s the gruesome magic of celebrity—our species’ final shared campfire before the lights go out. Tonight we toast Domingo; tomorrow we return to the bonfire of the vanities formerly known as civilization.

So file the Colman Domingo Doctrine somewhere between Nobel wishful thinking and a last cigarette before the firing squad. He is proof that excellence can still travel without a visa, that a Black, gay, middle-aged American can become the world’s bedtime story, and that—against all evidence—someone out there is still listening. The planet’s on fire, sure, but at least the soundtrack slaps.