Over the past decade, Oscar nominee Colman Domingo has become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, but he got his start right here in San Francisco. And he did so while enjoying shockingly cheap rent by today’s standards.
On a Tuesday episode of the podcast “Good Hang with Amy Poehler,” where he promoted the new film “Disclosure Day,” Domingo nostalgically discussed his time coming up in San Francisco’s theater scene in the 1990s. He had been struggling in school and working two jobs when some college friends encouraged him to take a semester off and move from Philadelphia to San Francisco. When he arrived, he shared a studio apartment in the Tenderloin with three friends, literally sleeping in a closet. The rent? $625, split four ways.
“This is also a terrible joke, but I literally slept in a closet,” he said.
At the time, he was working as a bartender writing plays, including one about coming of age as a young queer man, as well a musical about Donna Summer. He ended up staying in the city for about 10 years.
Domingo also recounted a story about how he met his husband via a Craigslist Missed Connections ad after glancing at him outside a Walgreens in Berkeley. And he shared that his acting goal early on while in the city was to score a spot on “Nash Bridges,” a 1990s cop drama based in SF. (During one episode, he played a criminal who kidnapped Don Johnson’s daughter.)
Domingo went on to discuss his working relationship on “Disclosure Day” with director Steven Spielberg, praising how supportive he was as a director, and his childlike enthusiasm for film.
“There’s no ego about the work,” Domingo said.
In the film, Domingo plays Hugo Wakefield, a defector from a powerful corporation who aims to help expose a government cover-up of extraterrestrial life. The film releases in theaters on June 12.
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