IT’S A VERY LONG STORY—Dominique Fishback: “Jay-Z told me he was honored that I played his mother”

Dominique Fishback is a famous American actress. She played Billie Rowan in Show Me a Hero, Darlene in The Deuce, and Deborah Johnson in Judas and the Black Messiah, the latter of which earned her nominations for the Critics’ Choice Movie Award and the BAFTA Award for Actress. Best supporting actress. Her artistic path is also a long story with many memories.

When she was 12 years old, Dominique Fishback was told by her school guidance counselor that she didn’t have the ‘it’ factor needed to be an actress. “My heart was broken and I went home crying,” Fishback recalls today, “but I went ahead and auditioned for LaGuardia anyway.”

Unfortunately, LaGuardia, the prestigious performing arts school in Manhattan where Timothée Chalamet and Awkwafina are alumni, also rejected her. So Fishback attended a regular high school in Brooklyn and instead focused on basketball for a while. But at the age of 15, the acting bug hit hard again. Fishback Googled “free acting programs for kids in New York” and won a spot in a short theater course that encouraged her to write her own material. It’s fair to say she never looked back. Fishback graduated from New York’s Pace University with a theater degree in 2013, then launched his own Off Broadway solo show, Subverted, the following year.

“From a young age I knew I had to love my job”

“From a young age, I knew I had to do what I loved every day,” she said. “I was so determined that I couldn’t be in the office. Like, I can’t see myself doing anything else, so I just have to have tunnel vision.” Now 30 years old, Fishback certainly proved LaGuardia and her school guidance counselor wrong. Last year, she received a BAFTA nomination for her stirring role in Judas and the Black Messi. As Black Panther Party activist Akua Njeri, formerly known as Deborah Johnson and the partner of the Chicago chapter’s brutally betrayed president Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), she fills the screen. with empathy, integrity and a quiet intelligence.

Following this captivating breakthrough, Fishback landed his first blockbuster movie role, in next year’s Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts. But first up is the mind-blowing limited series The Last Days Of Ptolemy Gray , which debuts this Friday on Apple TV+ . Adapted by Walter Mosley from his own novel, this is a profound and thought-provoking six-part story about a lonely 93-year-old man living with dementia. An elderly Samuel L. Jackson portrays the title character as physically healthy but increasingly confused as he accepts an unapproved miracle cure from a shadowy doctor. With his abilities restored, Gray attempts to achieve peace of mind by solving the mysterious murder of his beloved nephew Reggie (Omar Benson Miller).

Join Samuel L. Jackson in the new limited series ‘The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray’

It’s a somewhat drawn-out story that begins slowly, but the series is anchored by the blossoming relationship between Jackson’s character and Fishback’s Robyn, a 17-year-old orphan who has become hardened by her difficulties in life. At first, Robyn seemed a bit annoyed by the unkempt and unkempt older man and only showed up at his apartment because she had nowhere else to go. Soon, however, she demonstrates her compassion and practical skills by cleaning up his disgustingly messy apartment and becoming his substitute niece’s caretaker. When Gray regains his memory after accepting the doctor’s treatment, their relationship deepens in a very touching way. “In the book [Mosley] talks about there being two Robyns: one who drives with a knife and one who is very loving, and I wanted to make sure we could see two Robyns on the show,” Fishback said.

Working closely with a Hollywood legend like Jackson must have been intimidating, but Fishback didn’t let that faze her. “I’ve been in this [career] for so long and wanted it for so long, that I always told myself that when I get an opportunity like this, I’m going to make sure I do it,” she said. “And so I don’t think about the actor I’m playing with; I think about the character I’m here to portray and the story I’m here to tell.”

At the premiere of ‘The Last Days Of Ptolemy Gray’ with Samuel L. Jackson

Standing atop a luxury LA hotel room with the city skyline in the background, Fishback was open and friendly during our Zoom interview. Her energy level never drops and she doesn’t downplay the years of hustle that got her to this point. When NME asked when she first knew she was truly succeeding in her acting career, she replied: “I’ll be very honest: it was probably Judas. You know, I think it’s also because of the survival tactics that I had growing up. You can never say ‘this is it’. Things can be very fickle [in this business]. Nothing is promised, nothing is owed. So I just said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel comfortable.’”

Before Judas and Black Messi, Fishback had a regular supporting role on The Deuce, HBO’s well-received drama series about the porn industry in ’70s New York. She gave a compassionate performance as Donna Pickett, an ambitious, courageous but not cynical prostitute. Fishback also had a significant supporting role opposite Jamie Foxx in the Netflix superhero film Project Power and a smaller role in the coming-of-age hit The Hate U Give. Even so, she says Judas made her feel like she could legitimately call herself a “working actress” for the first time.

“Being the first black actress to star in a ‘Transformers’ movie is amazing”

Notably, Fishback handled this success by investing back into himself. “I took more voice and piano classes and spent money to do things I always wanted to do but was too scared to do,” she says. “Because before, I always felt like: ‘Who knows when my next job will come?’ And then [after] ordering Transformers, obviously it was like ‘Wow.’ I think when Transformers comes out, I’ll feel a little different again [about my career].”

Fishback is studying voice and piano because she also has musical ambitions. “I was really inspired by Lauryn Hill and especially the album MTV Unplugged,” she said. “I like that album because she kept a diary with her lyrics and her guitar, and she messed up some things. It’s speech and it’s very raw and rhythmic.” Fishback said that she wanted to use a spoken style that crossed genre lines the way Hill did. “I wanted to make my music really sincere instead of being pop music,” she said. “Hopefully it will be catchy and people will want to sing along, but for me it’s more about storytelling.”

Fishback has also ventured into the world of music videos by appearing in Jay-Z’s videos. She played the mother of hip-hop icon, Gloria Carter, in a clip accompanying his deeply personal 2017 track ‘Smile’. “No one has asked me about that!” Fishback said today, before revealing that she almost lost the role.

The video’s director Miles Jay offered Fishback the role of Gloria Carter after being impressed with her work in The Deuce, but his filming coincided with her filming schedule in The Hate U Give. “I wasn’t in a lot of scenes [in that movie], but the four days that Miles wanted to shoot this video were the four days that they needed me on set for the movie’s riot scenes. And there was no way the production could move anything so that I could make ‘Smile,’” she recalls.

Jay reluctantly told Fishback that he would have to audition other actresses for the role, but she did not give up. “I just pray about it,” she said. “I told God, ‘I know that the schedule is man-made and if I have to do it, it will be that way. But also, I’m from Brooklyn and you can’t put a Jay-Z video in front of me like that and take it away! A few days later, Jay texted her to say that no other actress felt suitable and that they were willing to wait for Fishback to become available.

Fishback says she was relieved that Hova himself never came to the set, “because maybe that would have been a little stressful,” but she did meet him a few months later at a brunch in Roc Nation in New York. “I remember him walking into the room and it was like all the energy rushed towards him,” she recalls with wide eyes. “He’s taller than you think and has a lot of presence. And I wasn’t really overwhelmed, but my heart was beating really fast.” Finally, she mustered up the courage to approach him and “it was like the crowd parted between us and we made eye contact.”

“Nothing happened to me, but Jay-Z made my heart beat so fast”

Fishback freely admits that she choked up in the presence of Jay-Z, a man she especially admired because he was one of Brooklyn’s most famous and successful sons. “I said, ‘Hello, I’m Dom…’ and he said ‘you don’t need to introduce yourself, I know who you are and I’d be honored to have you play my mother and take me back to my time. that point,’ she recalls. “And in my head I was like, ‘Oh my God, Jay-Z is saying these things to me!’ And in the end, the only thing I could think to say to him was: ‘Um, I’m from Brooklyn…’” At this, Fishback let out a self-deprecating laugh. “And he just said, ‘I know.’”

Fishback’s Brooklyn upbringing was clearly important to her. She brought up the matter again when NME asked about making Transformers: Rise of the Beasts , which finished production last October. “I am delighted to be working with director Steven Caple Jr. and Anthony Ramos, who is also from Brooklyn. He was my friend before,” she said. “So for us to be the first Latin actor and the first black actress to star in this series and also be from Brooklyn, that’s amazing to me. And I’m talking about old Brooklyn, you know, the real Brooklyn!”

She also has no time for the snobbery surrounding CGI-heavy blockbusters. “Those types of movies don’t get great critical acclaim, but it’s one of the most difficult types of movies to act in because you’re literally imagining things in your head,” she said. “They’re saying, ‘Hey, Optimus Prime is so tall – look at him over there! But there was clearly no one there so it was as if your emotions were in the air. It was definitely a challenge.”

A very different challenge Fishback is taking on is a screen adaptation of her one-woman show, Subverted. It was announced last April that her Project Power co-star Jamie Foxx would executive produce the film alongside her. “The idea was to do it as a special rather than a movie,” she says today. “I think Subverted has a very long lifespan and can take on any form it wants, but I want to honor my theatrical roots and the show I made.” Fishback has played more than 20 different characters in the stage show Subverted, but the special will focus on an 18-year-old girl named Eden who is witnessing the “destruction of Black identity.”

Jamie Foxx and Dominique Fishback in ‘Project Power’

“I don’t want to put [the special] in the moment,” she said. “Because one of the strengths of this show is that it talks about things that we’re still talking about today. I wrote this 10 years ago and it’s still true.”

In addition to these projects, Fishback wants to take on more comedic roles in the future. She is a huge fan of Jim Carrey and says that his 1997 film Liar Liar is one of her all-time favorites. Last year, she really enjoyed appearing in an episode of Amazon’s anthology series Modern Love because her character, Lil, is a stand-up comedian. “I did a 20-minute comedy over the course of five hours and they only used one minute of it!” she speaks. “I said, ‘Fuck it!’ But just knowing I can do that is really awesome. The producers even gave me compliments afterward.” She says her overall goal as a performer is to be seen as “undeniable.” Fishback’s career may be in a relatively low-key phase — she’s used to calling herself just a “working actress” — but it seems like she’s well on her way to achieving her goals.