Colman Domingo reflects on bringing love and light to the film industry at the AAFCA Awards

Variety

Coleman Domingo reflects on bringing love and light to the film industry at the AAFCA Awards

Transcript

00:00When you've been working for a long time,

00:03and Glenn and I both know that,

00:04we've been working for a long time,

00:06some longer than others,

00:10you start to get retrospectives of your work,

00:13and you get invited to these rooms

00:14and get these beautiful honors,

00:17and you start to think about,

00:18and really think in your quiet space,

00:21what you've been building and what you've been doing

00:23for me for 34 years.

00:26And then it culminates in a film like Sing Sing,

00:30and I start to realize what I've been trying to do.

00:34You know, I think as young actors,

00:35we think we're trying to build some work,

00:38make some moves, move the needle in many ways.

00:41And I realized with all the projects that I've been doing,

00:44and it's starting to crystallize now,

00:47and I still want it,

00:48and I invite you all to want that for yourselves too,

00:51is that I want to be love.

00:53I want to be love on every set.

00:56I want to empower my fellow actors

01:00to play with joy and respect.

01:03I want to build rooms that are equitable for everyone.

01:07I want to bring the light in all these dark places.

01:12We're in these rooms for 14 to 16 hours a day,

01:16away from our families,

01:18so why not make it the most joyful and the most loving?

01:22So I invite you all to do that,

01:23because I know that that's what I was able to,

01:26I was invited to be with Sing Sing.

01:29Greg gave me that responsibility

01:31to put myself in the center with these men

01:34who had never been on a film set,

01:37but they had this lived experience,

01:38and they found this light in the darkness called theater,

01:42and it's transformed their lives,

01:43especially my brother Clarence Macklin.

01:46So I want to say thank you, Greg,

01:52so I want to say thank you, Greg,

01:53for inviting me in to bring all that love

01:56and to spread that and to create something,

01:59because it needed to be created.

02:01It was not created to make money or anything like that.

02:05It was created because you said

02:07their stories deserve to be heard,

02:10and you wanted to give them everything they could

02:12to tell their story.

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