PASADENA, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 28: Colman Domingo attends the 57th NAACP Image Awards at Pasadena Civic Auditorium on February 28, 2026 in Pasadena, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images for NAACP) By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated March 11, 2026 Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…

When Colman Domingo sat down with host Vivian Tu on Season 5 of SoFi’s Richer Lives, he came with gems that Hollywood rarely makes room for. And that’s the unfiltered truth about what it actually costs to build a career in a gatekept industry when nobody is coming to write you a check.

Which makes sense, because a truthteller is always going to do what a truthteller does.

If his name is familiar but you can’t quite place why, here’s some context. Domingo has been a working actor for over three decades, moving through theater, television, and film long before mainstream audiences knew what to do with him. Most people found him through Fear the Walking Dead or Euphoria, but it was his portrayal of civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin in Rustin that put him in a category of his own, earning him an Academy Award nomination and making him the first openly Black gay man to receive one. Then came Sing Sing and a second nomination back to back. In 2024, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. 

He is a Temple University dropout who moved to San Francisco at 21 with a dream and very little else. And as you can see, the accolades are recent. The work is not.

But before any of it, Domingo was a kid from West Philadelphia watching his mother work multiple jobs just to keep the lights on. 

She did what mothers from the hood (and honestly, just what mothers would do period) have always done, which is figure it out with whatever they had. And her son was watching all of it. “My mother was working several jobs, she was cleaning houses as well as going back to school,” he shares. “And I think I learned from her the power of hard work. Nothing was going to be given to me.”

That understanding shaped everything that came after. His parents, both working people themselves, were clear about what they wanted for him. Not just a job, but a life built around purpose. “My parents said, we have jobs, we don’t want you to have a job. We want you to have a career,” Domingo recalls. “Find something that you want to do, and trust that that thing will take care of you.” He held onto that, even during the years when the industry gave him very little reason to.

Because the reality of pursuing art without a financial safety net is something most profiles about famous people skip right over. Domingo is not interested in skipping it.

 “There were times I didn’t think I could afford my career. I just thought it didn’t make sense. I don’t come from means. Anything I had was because I earned it. Plain and simple. I could never go and ask my parents to help me because they were barely able to help themselves.” 

Over 35 years of working in entertainment, he kept that survival instinct close and stayed ready for whatever the moment required. “I was a hustler. I know how to bartend. I can dance. I can act. I can cut hair. I could do anything to make a buck while I pursue my art. And sometimes I may look like I’m not on an artistic path, but maybe I’m on a path to pay my bills to take care of the artistic life that I wanted.”

That perspective has only gotten sharper with time. These days, Domingo is intentional about how the business side of his career serves the creative side. “Most of my artistic pursuits have never been about money. It’s always been about the art,” he says. “As I’ve gotten older and wiser, I know that I do need that cushion as well to be able to do that work. That’s why I’ve worked in the branding spaces or the fashion spaces, one feeds the other. So I can actually go and do the things that I really care about.”

It is a lesson that took decades to learn and one that he is clearly not keeping to himself.

The post Before The Oscars And Emmys, Colman Domingo Was Bartending And Cutting Hair To Survive Hollywood appeared first on Essence.

Author: Kimberly Wilson

Read the original article on Essence.