Oscar Nominee Colman Domingo Nearly Quit Acting Before Fear the Walking Dead: “It Changed My Entire Career”

Colman Domingo is singing the praises of Fear the Walking Dead. The two-time Oscar-nominated actor — who will compete at the 2025 Oscars in the Best Actor category for his role as John “Divine G” Whitfield in Sing Sing — revealed that he almost quit acting before he was cast as ruthless survivor Victor Strand in the Walking Dead spinoff series set at the onset of the zombie apocalypse. Domingo, who joined the first season in 2015, was the only cast member to appear in all eight seasons of the AMC zombie drama that aired its final season in 2023.

“I was a theater snob. I was like, ‘Absolutely not,’” Domingo said of his initial reaction to the series on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. His agent approached him with what was being described as “the precursor to The Walking Dead,” the record-breaking cable show adapting the Image comics by writer Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard.

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“I was like, ‘What’s that?’” Domingo recalled. “They said, ‘You don’t know The Walking Dead? It’s a huge show on AMC.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t watch TV.’ And so I know I really had an attitude when she said, ‘After seeing the script, I think you would really like this.’”

“Immediately, I thought, ‘Obviously this person does not know me, because she’s going to send me some genre thing, some TV thing I’m not interested in.’ She sends me the sides, and it was fantastic,” Domingo continued. “I didn’t know TV could be like this. It was rich, it was great storytelling, and a really provocative character. I had a take on the character, so I sent that tape in without even thinking about it. And then literally a couple days later, I got an offer — just from a self tape — to be a series regular on Fear the Walking Dead.”

Created by Kirkman and original showrunner Dave Erickson, AMC launched Fear in 2015 as a companion series to The Walking Dead (then the #1 show on television among adults 18-49). At first set in Los Angeles in the earliest days of the walker apocalypse, the series also starred Kim Dickens, Cliff Curtis, Frank Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Lorenzo James Henrie and Elizabeth Rodriguez as a dysfunctional blended family who first encounter the shady Strand while escaping LA.

As the series changed locations and cast members — moving to Mexico, Texas, and Georgia, with Garret Dillahunt, Maggie Grace, Jenna Elfman, and The Walking Dead‘s Lennie James all joining the creatively rebooted show in season 4 — Domingo was there for it all, even undergoing a turn as the villain in season 7 before his redemption arc in the eighth and final season.

“[Fear the Walking Dead] literally did change my entire career,” Domingo said. “Just before that, I thought I had achieved what I was supposed to achieve, and I was kindly ready to step away from the whole industry. Things were just not progressing the way I thought that made sense. I wasn’t booking [roles], I wasn’t working, I had no access or agency, and I was entering my mid-forties. I was like, ‘I can’t sustain this. I need to get a real job.’ Or at least a job that makes sense. The life of an artist was just too rocky for me at the time, and I was trying to make a decision where I wouldn’t be bitter or hardened by this industry. I wanted to step away while I still loved it, but then Fear the Walking Dead gave me footing back in the industry in a new way.”

Following his roles in the Steven Spielberg-directed Lincoln (2012), opposite Chadwick Boseman in the Jackie Robinson biographical sports drama 42 (2013), Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), and Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014), Domingo went on to star with Zendaya in HBO’s Euphoria and won his first Emmy for his role as Ali. Domingo was also nominated at last year’s Oscars for his role as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in Netflix’s Rustin.

Domingo currently voices Norman Osborn in the Marvel Animation series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and his upcoming projects include Edgar Wright’s Running Man remake starring Glen Powell, Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael, and the Russo brothers-directed sci-fi film The Electric State starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt.