The other night at the movie theater, I saw not multiple trailers for summer blockbusters that made excellent use of Colman Domingo’s resonant voice. Like Brendan Gleeson, who hosted SNL in late 2022, Domingo is a veteran actor who has appeared in a wide range of projects. (I’m partial to his utterly chilling work in Zola, myself.) And, like Gleeson, Domingo’s range made him well-suited for a wide-ranging episode.
This week, Domingo got opportunities to go big as well as to play a relatively restrained role amidst chaos. He also got to do both, as one sketch that riffed on PBS science programming of a bygone age aptly showed. The sketch was posited as an episode of a television show called What If I Told You, with Domingo as the program’s host, one Henry Debris.
One thing becomes clear very early in the sketch: Henry Debris really enjoys revealing that certain objects on the set are actually people in disguise. (Some are more convincing than others.) But things quickly take a strange turn from there, and the sketch manages to be both a reminder of Domingo’s skill as an actor and a series of escalatingly strange developments.
Alternately: it’s a sketch that features Andrew Dismukes dressed as a vase; the context is somewhat ridiculous, but the end result winds up as far more heartwarming than one might expect. And it turns out that, as with nearly everything the man wears, Domingo can also make a plaid blazer look memorable.
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