Dominique Fishback: The Star, The Actress and The Character, staying true to her Brooklyn essence.

Dominique Fishback is enjoying the crowning success of her already glorious career: Swarm, Amazon Prime’s pop-idolatry comedy thriller, for which she has been nominated for a Best Actress Emmy. Work has taken her closer to Hollywood but her connection back home to East New York remains strong, showing a new generation there how to get into the arts and tell their own story.

Dominique Fishback wears Loro Piana throughout.

Dominique Fishback is sitting in her little sister’s bedroom in East New York, Brooklyn, one hot summer Monday morning. Though one of the less referenced parts of Brooklyn neighbourhoods, East New York was and always will be a beloved place that will always be home to Dominique. What appears to be a knitted owl is floating above the actor’s head in the corner of her Zoom frame. ‘Actually, it’s a sloth,’ she corrects, smiling. Dominique is a lively, unguarded communicator, blessed with her city’s natural gift for storytelling. Befitting her tipping-point position in the young-acting canon as one of the most promising performers of her generation, she now lives in Los Angeles. 

In a crowning 2023, she has turned in one of the most arresting screen performances of the year, as Dre in the brilliant TV series Swarm. Dre is a deranged yet curiously sympathetic homicidal fan of a barely fictionalised Beyoncé in Donald Glover’s first endeavour to honour his golden handcuffs production deal at Amazon Prime. After being offered a supporting role in the series, Dominique asked instead to anchor it. She wanted to go to a dark place. ‘At a certain point,’ she says, ‘I’m 32 years old, I’m a lead actress. I am. Now is the time.’ 

Her decade’s work prior was an already impeccable roll call of virtuoso supporting roles. Straight out of university, she was cast in David (The Wire) Simon’s The Deuce, a scrupulous study of Seventies sex work in and around Times Square. She has starred opposite Daniel Kaluuya in Judas and The Black Messiah, Jamie Foxx in Project Power, Samuel L Jackson in The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. She was cast by Jay-Z to play his mom, Gloria Carter, in the video for his touching gay equality anthem ‘Smile’.

Two weeks after we speak, she receives an Emmy Best Actress nomination for bringing Dre to life, validating her early request to the boss. She says that at the first table read, Glover passed on some words of wisdom that would hang over the project. ‘He said, “I just want the opportunity to try something. And if it fails, it fails.”’ She thought about this but knew in her heart that it wouldn’t fail. 

One of the crew told her that he had never seen a script like it, where the lead actress is in every single episode, in every single scene. ‘There is no B storyline. It doesn’t cut to another person to follow their life. It’s literally Dre, Dre, Dre, Dre, Dre.’ In her first protagonist’s role, she was aiming only for greatness. Now she can reap the rewards of that tenacity. 

Swarm is the second Donald Glover project to use the broadside exploitation shortcomings of the music industry to scope out the human psyche. He doesn’t like the glossy surface; he likes the underbelly. Dominique says she was inspired by some favourite performances. ‘Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry, Charlize Theron in Monster.’ As Dre, it felt like she was channelling something of the lunatic precision of American Psycho. Like Bret Easton Ellis, Glover is expert at setting his work in an exact cultural moment, drawing from the present to understand the perennial. 

‘This was definitely an actor’s boot camp,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have time to do stunt rehearsals. I didn’t have time to even prep the new episodes we were getting. Even the mall monologue, I forgot that that was the next day when I was looking at the sides.’ They shot on film. ‘I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to ruin this.” It was truly by the grace of God.’ And now the award nominations, another mesmerising visibility upshift.      

When she moved from New York to LA, Dominique knew exactly which pieces of the city’s savvy to carry alongside her. ‘I am one hundred per cent always New York,’ she says proudly. Recently, she went to the same local Linden Multiplex in which she schooled herself in movies – ‘the one that I used to go to all the time’ – to watch herself in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, the latest instalment in the blockbuster robot action franchise that she’s currently fronting. 

She took her mom and little sister to the multiplex. While the lights were still dimmed, she’d ask people around her, ‘You liked it?’ and then delight in their shocked faces when the house lights revealed who was making the inquisition. ‘I wanted to come back and see it where I’m from,’ she says. ‘People were like, “Whaaaat?” One woman said, “Are you playing with me or are you for real?” Oh my gosh.’

Transformers and Swarm have turned Dominique Fishback into a bona fide star, though she is charmingly unfazed by all that. When I share the information that the former is currently grossing $4 million a day in America, swelling a $350 million three-week worldwide gross, she holds her hands up. ‘I didn’t even know that, so thank you for telling me. When they say the box office is doing well? I don’t even know exactly what that means.’ 

Does helping oil the passage of $4 million a day change her sense of herself? ‘No. Not at all.’ 

Prior to filming Transformers and Swarm back to back, she gave herself a little life lesson. For Dominique, the idea of fame would always be a by-product of acting, not vice versa, so she travelled around everywhere on the subway. ‘As New Yorkers,’ she says, ‘we hate the train. It’s crowded, it’s dirty, there’s all this stuff. But I thought, yo, what if next year I can’t ride the train and I’m pissed off? What if it’s something I’m missing and I long for? At least I can do everything and have an awareness of it before something happens.’ 

It happened. Now back in East New York, she recently took a local schools tour, including a visit to her old high school in Brownsville. At 32, with the kindly benefit of hindsight, she understood implicitly the frequency the kids operate on. Dominique Fishback’s approach to levelling up is very much show, don’t tell. ‘They’re not easily impressed,’ she says. ‘And I come from that environment, and you don’t have to be easily impressed.’ 

She’d sit with them a while, asking questions about their hopes and dreams, nodding to remind them that those aspirations don’t have to remain empty, that doors can open. ‘I really wanted to go back to that school and for [the kids] to see, face to face, that it is possible for your dreams to come true.’ Dominique is keen for this not to seem like some do-gooder activist programme. ‘I don’t feel a responsibility,’ she says. She knows that these kids can take care of themselves. ‘I don’t have to think about talking about my neighbourhood. It’s not work. It just is. Being a New Yorker, it’s a Brooklyn thing, it’s innate.’ 

The outside perception of Brooklyn has changed dramatically in Dominique Fishback’s lifetime. ‘I always say that I am from Old Brooklyn,’ she stresses. Art rock bands don’t visit Brownsville. Gallerists didn’t move in. The girls from Girls never filmed there. Like most places untouched by fancifying town planners, a particular kind of civic pride is shared among residents. ‘I don’t go into details or below surface level about it,’ she clarifies, ‘but I don’t think people really understand, because they see Brooklyn as a place that’s gentrified, a place like Williamsburg.’ 

In Transformers, her co-star Anthony Ramos’s Noah turns at one pivotal point to Dominique’s Elena and shouts out, gleefully, ‘It’s Brooklyn, baby!’, a rallying cry to the stars. That line meant a lot to both of them. She’d known Ramos from neighbouring Bushwick for several years. ‘We were friends before the movie. We’d sit in cafés in Brooklyn and say, we’ve got to do something real epic together, real Brooklyn, one day, and that was back in 2018.’ The blockbuster was imbued with meaning.  

Shot against a soundtrack of late Eighties/early Nineties golden-age NYC hip hop, Transformers extends rather than reinvents the blockbuster model. LL Cool J’s ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’, Black Sheep’s ‘The Choice Is Yours’, platinum-plated classics by the Notorious B.I.G, Nas, Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest ring out, as if to reaffirm the proud culture the big superhero narrative has been soldered in. ‘You’ve got the rhythm,’ she says, ‘you’ve got the hero, you’ve got the girl, you get to go on the hero’s journey. That we know, based off of movie structure for the last 15 years. What we don’t know, because we never had it, is Black and Brown people leading the franchise. All of this stuff is infused in Black culture and Brooklyn culture. We’ve never had that before.’ Ramos and Fishback both sit on the artistic advisory board of Opening Act, a non-profit designed to help inner city youth develop in the arts and share their stories. 

‘With every project I do, I have to watch it once, as the actor,’ she says, ‘to see what scene I’ve missed or whatever, the things you need as an actor. Then after I’m able to watch as an audience member and not feel like it’s me. “OK, I believe her. She would do that.” They start to take on their own identity.’ 

In the promotional mania surrounding Transformers, she’s been thinking back to those conversations she used to have with Ramos. ‘Anthony grew up in the projects. I grew up in an area that is not easy either. When I was about 12, I used to play football on the block with the boys and every time we would play a game, this one boy who would play with us would leave us to go and play baseball. I find out all these years later that he was on Anthony’s baseball team. The proximity is insane.’  

Dominique Fishback has a tattoo on her right forearm that she shows me. ‘It says “be yourself, love” in my mom’s handwriting, see?’ She has a small clothing line now using the same slogan. ‘I have hats and sweatshirts. I want to make that a movement. Because when I was leaving New York to go to LA, sometimes, you can feel really alone. You can be at these Hollywood parties. You can be at this premier. Your visibility can be big. But you can get anxiety, talking, doing interviews, being on social media. There’s a lot going on right now. So,’ she says, nodding towards her tattoo, ‘I want to be able to look down and see that.’

She repeats the expression. ‘If you are yourself, if you are being love, then nothing can go wrong. Even when you make mistakes. We all reserve the right to grow and change our minds and make mistakes. That’s what we all are here for.’

Dominique Fishback caught the acting bug while watching Lucille Ball on a Comedy Central rerun at 1am while still at elementary school. ‘When I was 10 I started watching I Love Lucy,’ she says. She liked the way Ball moved to make people laugh. ‘I was cutesy, funny, dorky, silly, all that kind of stuff. So I was like, she’s me!’ 

She amassed a little roll call of comedy heroes. ‘I loved Jim Carrey. I obviously watched a lot of Jamie Foxx. I loved Shia [LaBeouf] in Even Stevens. He was incredible.’ Her big favourite was Zooey Deschanel as Jessica Day in the Friends-lite sitcom New Girl. ‘I started going on this research trip and I read the show bible. It described her as “a modern-day Lucille Ball”. So if anything I’m going to be consistent. That’s me. I feel like I’m Jessica Day from the hood.’

By the time she reached the point of studying for her degree in theatre, things had taken a more serious turn. ‘Even right before school, I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to go because of money. I didn’t enter the dorms when everybody else entered the dorms.’ Her campus was Downtown Manhattan, by the Brooklyn Bridge: a few miles from home, a world away. ‘Even though I was valedictorian at high school, they admitted me as below average and said I needed extra attention academically from the university. I didn’t know how I could be the top in one area in New York and go right across the bridge and not even be considered the average.’ 

Her university sounds a little like an academic variant of the school in Fame. ‘When I entered my first class, my teacher said to us, “Hey, acting is not just a job or a career, it’s a lifestyle. So if there is something else in the world that you think you could be doing other than this, go do it.” I was like, “I’m here, I’m in it.” That was the first day.’

Her favourite mentor was a theatre history adjunct named Jennifer Holmes. ‘She wasn’t even a full-time professor. That was a sin from them. They fixed it.’ Holmes sounds like a crucial part of the Dominique Fishback story. ‘A lot of times I was the only Black person in my class, and she tapped a world awareness that made me not feel so isolated. In theatre, she picked the plays that required I could actually sit in a truth.’

At school, it was a white boy speaking up in sociology class which focused her intentions, affirming what she wanted to use acting and writing to do. ‘He said if African American guys in low-income communities dressed normally, they wouldn’t be stopped by the police,’ she recalls. ‘I was mortified. I was debating with him and struggling over my words and got flustered and frustrated, and nobody could advocate with me because nobody came from where I came from.’ 

It fired her ambition. As a final project, Dominique Fishback wrote and performed a one-woman show, Subverted. ‘I decided that for one hour and 20 minutes at this predominantly white university, whoever comes to this show has to sit in my truth and the truth of people who come from areas like mine. To be able to share the raw truth about my experiences.’

The Dominique Fishback professional story had begun. Gloria Steinem saw the show and eulogised about it to whoever would listen. When she finally worked with Jamie Foxx, he asked her about it. She sent him clips from the production and a script. He vowed there and then to turn it into a special for TV.

Dominique Fishback says that performing as Dre in Swarm is the role she is so far most proud of. ‘One hundred per cent. I’m a producer on it. I asked for the role. I didn’t just take what was expected of me. There are things that only happened because I was in that show. I advocated for that. I feel very proud that I advocated for myself, for the character and for my culture.’

She thinks it honoured a little pact she made at the start of her career. ‘I feel like the deal I made with God is that he said, “You’re going to get everything you want in terms of film and TV and all that stuff, as long as you always tell your own story from your own voice.” I can’t just do other people’s things. I have to say, hey, I’m from East New York – these are my experiences. The impossible is possible.’