Rikers. Alcatraz. Devil’s Island. Sing Sing.

These are infamous carceral spaces with names that can instantly arouse a feeling of fear in a listening ear. Fear of incarcerated people and their ostensible legal transgressions, fear of confined space, stolen time and distance from a material reality spurred by selective intimacy and self-control.

“Whether we will it it or not, we all have unconscious bias towards people who are in prison,” says Colman Domingo, the lead of Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing. “There are so many tropes that cinema has leaned into when it comes to talking about prisoners,” he tells me, explaining it’s the job of the artist “to focus on the hope and the healing and the humanity of these people,” despite their being contained in a place that’s “pretty much hell on earth. But people are trying to find—and make use of and work with and gain tools with—light… The gifts of art [can] actually transform not only themselves, but transform their families, and then, eventually, when outside, their communities.”

In Sing Sing—which currently holds an impressive 4.2-out-of-five star rating on Letterboxd— Domingo is John “Divine G” Whitfield, a playwright and actor who helms RTA, a rehabilitative theater program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison in New York, where he is incarcerated on murder charges.

“As I got to know the character that I’m based on, John, [I felt] here’s someone who advocated for others and did work in the law library and believed that the system could actually work for someone who was incarcerated for a crime that he didn’t commit,” Domingo says. “He still believed that there’s a system, there’s a process. And you trust the process, it will work, [though] it doesn’t work for him yet.”

As Divine G, Mike Mike (Sean San José), Blaze (Jon-Adrian Velazques), Sean Dino Johnson (playing himself) and their peers prepare for their production and recruit the infamously pugnacious inmate, Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (also playing himself) to audition for it, Sing Sing unfurls and ruptures common conceptions of what makes for an effecting prison film. It exists beyond the organized crime syndicate character studies of A Prophet or prison escape ploys of Escape from Alcatraz or (say it with me) Shawshank Redemption.

Sing Sing was filmed on-site in the eponymous prison with formerly incarcerated RTA actors filling out the film’s ensemble. The choice to film at Sing Sing and lean upon the lived experience of people who navigated the space elevates the picture out of the voyeuristic, fetishistic crawl space it could have otherwise collapsed into—gorgeous dolly shots, medium close-up laughter, brotherly gisting and all.

There is a palpable sense of responsibility and intention about capturing incarceration on screen that pools through Domingo’s ruminations and the production’s framework. The actor muses, “Someone asked, ‘How can you play that if you haven’t lived it?’ And I thought, well, you don’t have to live it. You have to have empathy for it, a tremendous amount of empathy of: what if everything was taken from you, in of your access?”

To ensure Sing Sing was not made from a purely extractive creative place, the film’s co-writer and co-producer Clint Bentley alongside Kwedar and Domingo championed an equity model for the film which offered cast and crew personal ownership, even pay and stake in Sing Sing’s financial successes, a production facet that further attracted Domingo to the project.

“Every single way that my director and fellow producers wanted it to get done appealed to me. This is how we change the systems. This is how we advocate for each other truly on a granular level.”

Prior to his notable performances in Euphoria, The Color Purple, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Zola, Selma and his recent Oscar-nominated work as Bayard Rustin, a gay Quaker Civil Rights organizer, in Rustin, Domingo was an arts organizer in the Bay Area’s community theater space. A theater practitioner for over 30 years, he began on a small stage for young audiences (“I think I was pretty much groomed believing that theater should be taken to schools, because they were filling the gap where there wasn’t theater,” he says) before touring with different companies, talking about conflict resolution, HIV/AIDS, building friendship and more. “I was also in the circus, but that’s a whole other story,” he laughs, saying that all these experiences shaped his approach to embodying Divine G.

“As a young actor, that was truly the blessing of the work that was coming my way, which was intentional and purposeful work, making work that hopefully made a difference and made people think differently,” Domingo recalls. “I feel like I was being used for more high vibrational work, you know what I mean? And was making a deep impact on people and the way they thought. So, that’s at my core. I think that all of that starts to play into not only Sing Sing, [but] a lot of work that I’ve been navigating for years… I feel like now it’s the thing that I always tell other artists: the art that you are seeking is also seeking you.”

He continues, “We were recruiting something that was brand new, something that took us outside of any of the boxes that we’d even believed we were making. I had an idea of what we were making, but once we got to practice, I started to realize that this was an organism that was constantly shifting based on the truth of the day, what made sense in the moment. When I watch the film, it feels immediate… you can’t tell what’s scripted, what’s not. You can’t tell who was in prison for over ten years and who was not. There’s this beautiful blend that’s happening.”

In the same vein that limited settings and intriguing character dynamics endear an audience to a play, the relationship between Divine G and his fellow thespians allures viewers to the world of Sing Sing. Of these dynamics, Divine G’s relationship to “Divine Eye” Maclin is among the most striking. The latter is what I call a space-taker-upper, a character whose physicality and language demands your attention, a cartilage character whom the story could not exist without.

As Divine Eye stalks around the courtyard, upkeeping his fuck-around-and-find out aire, Divine G and Mike Mike consider him, looking there across the concrete at his personhood and discussing what an invite to RTA may do to him. Domingo recalls leaning upon the wisdom and undeniable force of Maclin, who was himself incarcerated at Sing Sing for fifteen years.

“I had to lean into that because, yes, I don’t have a lived experience in that way,” he its. “I knew that was part of his gift to the process, to help us create a depiction of these people that you never see, people who are human, who have aspirations and dreams and desires to build differently, to get tools for betterment to be of service in some way, shape or form.”

The actor goes on to praise the importance of Maclin’s first-hand knowledge, saying there was “a great balance between the two of us. What he didn’t have, I had in volume, and vice versa. The juxtaposition of it is already fascinating. They build very strong personalities, but have very different ways and different sets of tools to actually move through these spaces. But at some point they realized they need each other instead of being separate. I mean, what a beautiful message that is for people in the world… There’s nothing more powerful than when they embrace at the end and it feels like the heavens sink.”

Domingo has stated that “art might be the parachute that saves us all,” and so I asked him how acting for the stage and the screen has saved him; what he hopes art does for people, for humanity, for the species in the decades to come.

“What a question. I can immediately say that when I was doing a show called ing Strange, I lost my mother. I was untethered in every single way. I just lost my father six months before. I was working through the biggest emotions that anyone could ever feel or experience and feeling completely lost. My art was the thing I held onto, where it helped me grieve, [to] give words to things that were unspeakable, [to] find a way and a path forward.”

As our conversation nears its end, he pivots to discuss the decades to come. “I hope for the future,” he enthuses. “We always go to stories and storytelling, and define vulnerability and sincerity in it. That’s the way that we become human, the way we show the completeness of who we are. What a divine, divine artform, whether it’s theater, or film, or television.”

He concludes by praising how these mediums can have such an effect on the viewers, even when they think they have “nothing to do with people who were inmates, in a sense. You thought you’ve met them and me, and you go into a movie theater, and you think, ‘Oh, we are more alike than not alike. Their needs are my needs. Their wants are my wants.’”