Working with Chadwick Boseman on ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ taught Colman Domingo to treat each role ‘as the last one’

“Where the hell was God when all this was going on?” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t God strike down them crackers with some of this lightning you talking about to me?”

Boseman continued to unravel the yarn, fully embodying the crisis of faith afflicting his character, Levee, an ambitious trumpet player from August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” set in 1920s Chicago. God takes a Black man’s prayers and throws them away, Levee declares to Domingo’s trombonist, Cutler, claiming that God “hates” Black people “with all the fury in his heart.”

The scene arrives in the explosive third act of Wilson’s play, newly adapted for the screen by George C. Wolfe. Domingo says he will never forget that day on the set. In an interview with The Washington Post, the actor recalls how he and Boseman were “very open to each other as Black men, as brothers in this industry.” Their characters are at odds, Levee’s raging doubt sparring with Cutler’s deep conviction, but between the actors there was only ever “support and love and respect.”

Boseman died in August of colon cancer, his illness only known to a select few as he worked through the four-year battle. “Ma Rainey,” for which he is already an Oscars front-runner, is his final film.

“I didn’t know how ill Chad was,” Domingo says. “I assume now that it was part of the moment, part of the truth … you’re afraid of, like, what if [Levee] is right? No faithful person wants to believe that God doesn’t exist, or that God wasn’t there to look after people. You don’t want to believe that. But there’s that little question that hurts you, and it challenges everything you’re made of.”

“Ma Rainey” takes place over the course of a single day at the recording studio, starting with the musicians awaiting the brilliant, tempestuous blues singer’s arrival (Michael Potts and Glynn Turman round out the four-piece band). When she arrives, we learn Ma (Viola Davis) has been under immense pressure to sign her music over to White management, who won’t even bother to buy her a Coke. As she tells Cutler, “They don’t care nothin’ about me. All they want is my voice.”

There are countless ways Wilson could have approached Rainey’s story, given her remarkable career and influence on the genre. But the slice-of-life framework — which screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson helped build here — exposes all the factors at play within a single recording session.

“Not much is happening, which is also pretty fascinating about the film,” Domingo says. “There’s a chess match at play, and then somebody is playing checkers at one point and you don’t know when they switched the game. And then we’re playing dice. The game, it’s shifting. It’s all just one day showing how an African American artist … specifically Ma Rainey, who is an outspoken bisexual Black woman, how she’s moving through the day, and her bandmates.”

Domingo counts himself among a group of actors deemed “Wilsonites,” as he played Gabriel years ago in a regional production of “Fences” and, more recently, directed “Seven Guitars” at a nonprofit theater. “Fences” marked the first time he tackled the specific language used by “the Black Shakespeare of our times,” as he describes the celebrated playwright, and really wrestled with Wilson’s profound exploration of “our dreams, our wishes, our fears.”

The actor began researching before he was sent the final script, getting ahold of the play itself and reading up on Rainey’s actual band to build out a backstory for his fictionalized character. Raised in Philadelphia, Domingo turned in part to the experiences of his stepfather, who is from the South, to better understand Black men “who came to the North to have some agency in their lives, but still [came] with everything they believe about Black people, about the way they’re treated.”

“You can research the music, you can research the language, but [Wilson] doesn’t write something that is outside of you as an African American,” Domingo says. “It’s one of the rare opportunities where you’re like: ‘Oh, I can go into family storerooms. I can go to our experiences in America and bring that in. And then I can bring in my own personal experiences as an artist.’”

Tension builds between Levee, whose restless ambition leads to frustration with Ma’s way of running the show, and the remaining band members, who operate on survival mode. The film’s camerawork emphasizes how tight of a space the recording studio is, the walls closing in on the band as Levee reaches his breaking point. As actors, Domingo says, “we have to bring everything we’re afraid of and lean into it.” The fiery fight between Levee and Cutler proves as much.

Boseman was a man of faith, as is Domingo, adding yet another layer of personal resonance to the climactic scene, Domingo says. He looks back on a take in which Boseman paused when he got to the point in the script where Levee yells to Cutler that God takes the prayers of Black men and “throw them in the garbage.” Boseman seemed to choke up a bit, unable to continue.

But Domingo sensed that “whatever was boiling up inside Chadwick was ready to come out,” and, in character, yelled to his co-star: “Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!” Boseman snapped back into it, and the actors threw themselves into their characters’ teary rage until Wolfe yelled cut. Then, they embraced and “just stood there for a minute,” Domingo says. “Grown men, crying.”

“It’s that place where you knew you were working on that other level. It wasn’t just the words that August Wilson gave us, we were tapping into things in our souls,” he continues. “You’ve got to perform every film as the last one. The work that we do, I don’t take any of that for granted. Every film could be my last. And to know that this was Chad’s last, you want to put so much love and light around it.”

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is now streaming on Netflix.