Swarm Star Dominique Fishback On Channeling Humanity, Heart And Love Into Her Most Complex Roles

Dominique Fishback didn’t mean to scare you. Despite playing a murderer on Prime Video’s Swarm, Fishback swears her intentions were pure. For her, the chance to star as Dre — an infatuated fan of an R&B superstar named Ni’Jah, who feels compelled to kill anyone with a negative opinion of the artist — was kismet. Created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, the series sparked critical discourse online regarding the representation of Black female characters and the dark side of online fandoms. Here, Fishback gets candid about her career path, her determination to uphold self-belief and how she approached playing a stone-cold killer.

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DEADLINE: You got your start after basically googling ‘free acting classes,’ and then you wrote and starred in a one-woman play in college. This sounds daunting.

DOMINIQUE FISHBACK: Yeah, I was 15. I have chills just thinking about it, but it wasn’t daunting. I started writing poetry when I was 12, and my mom used to say, “Wow, Dom, you came up with that by yourself?” And I’d be like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “That’s really good.” So, I always had a knack for writing, and then I found this theater company and just wanted to act. And in order to act with this company, I had to write my own stuff, which was great. I saw my first one-woman show there called No Child, where a woman became different characters right before your eyes. Eventually, the director Stephen DiMenna asked me to get up there and do the same thing. So, I wrote one for my thesis to graduate from college called Subverted.

DEADLINE: It deals with the struggles of Black identity, right? What inspired this?

FISHBACK: I was in a sociology class at Pace University — I was often the only Black person in my classes — and this white boy said, “If African American males and low-income communities dressed normally, they wouldn’t be stopped by the police.” And I was so mad. I was frustrated, and I was debating with him, and I was stumbling over my words, and I looked around and nobody could advocate with me because nobody came from where I came from. And I realized that a lot of people from my neighborhood don’t get to go to a private university. Because I had this opportunity, I then wanted to use it to tell stories like mine because I would be remiss if I didn’t. So, in the show, my character unpacks her own experiences, and it connects to the slave era. It goes back and forth between the slave and modern eras to show comparisons. I played between 20 and 22 characters.

DEADLINE: You’ve cycled through heavy subject matter from Judas and the Black Messiah or The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray to Swarm. Do your characters ever come home with you?

FISHBACK: I think they live in the body rather than in the head for me. I don’t think about them that much. And I do this thing where we can be doing a dramatic scene, and then they say cut, and I’m like, “What’s up?” I don’t stay in character. I’m not method in that way. It gets tiring pushing or wanting to be seen or prove that you can do something and waiting for that opportunity. But I saw that 11 years ago on Facebook, I wrote this post saying, “I heard six shots outside my window while I’m trying to sleep. No wonder why I run from bullets in my dreams. All I can see is my Brooklyn residency. Sunset Boulevard seems so far from me.” Because I knew I wanted to act. And now, seeing my face on one of the biggest billboards on Sunset Boulevard for Swarm is amazing. Manifestation is real. So, although I’m tired, I can only give thanks to God that my dreams have manifested themselves.

DEADLINE: You were initially supposed to play Marissa (Chlöe Bailey, Dre’s foster sister) in Swarm before you were cast as Dre. Why Dre? And how did you advocate for yourself?

FISHBACK: The role spoke to me because I’ve always loved Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight, Charlize Theron in Monster and Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. And in telling me the idea of this story, not in these words particularly, but how they described this [concept] was all possible with one role, I said, “Man, I could do that.” So, when they told me they wanted me to play Marissa, I said, “OK.”  But I already knew in the conversation that I wanted to play Dre. And I was going to tell them, “I appreciate the offer, but I’m ready to tackle my own lead project. I’ve been supporting other people for a long time. It’s great, and I love to do it, but I’ve worked at this since I was 15.” So that’s the energy I had. When I wake up every day, I want to be challenged as an actor.

So, I got on the phone with Donald, and he said, “Well, tell me what’s going on.” And I said to myself, ‘Listen, after doing something like Judas and doing something like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, what do you do next? How do you not catch up to yourself? I don’t want to even predict the type of roles that I want to do next. I want to go back to that inner child, that younger Dom that watched everything and said, I want to do this, this and this, and didn’t put limitations on what she wanted to do.’  And that’s how I approached it with him.

Donald basically said, “Well, if that’s the role you want, that’s the role you get.” And I was like, ‘Did he just give me the role?’ It was no audition after that. And it was nice not to have to prove myself because I knew I had done these different projects, and I’m like, ‘I can do this.’ And I’m glad I didn’t have to put on a show to show I can do it because I feel like if I had done an audition, sure, it would’ve probably gone well. But I got to tap into Dre because there was ownership.

DEADLINE: Dre has some quirky physicality in the way she binge eats after killing or the intense way she stares at people. How did you come up with her traits?

FISHBACK: That was so fun. It was me being like, ‘OK, she’s emotionally stunted. What does that mean?’ I felt like when she’s asked questions, she probably mimics Marissa. So, if somebody says, “Marissa, how you doing?” She’d be like, “Girl, I’m tired.” And then Dre would try to copy that, but she has to search her mind to try and say the right thing at the right time. She doesn’t have a poker face. So that means everything, like when a guy touches her in episode three at the gym, she’s like, “Why are you touching me?” it became just allowing her to be impulsive and not too small. I just tried different things that were free and fun. I think I was dealing a lot, too, in my life with masculine and feminine energy and knowing that we all have both of those polarities inside and figuring out the balance.

A lot of times when I do a role, I’m questioning myself in mind and body, and Dre was no different. From the beginning of the show, she has this dark, sexy feminine energy. And by the end of the show, she has wounded masculine energy. In school, you learn how the character differs from the beginning to the end of the scene. That’s structure, but then everything in between is fair game. So masculine energy is structure and feminine energy is flow. And that’s how I approached this character in a structured way. I allowed myself to be influenced by what was actually happening. Dre has an opinion about everything. The way a chair feels, the way a table feels. Maybe she don’t like the texture of the chair, but if she don’t like it, you’re gonna know. And that was fun to figure it out.

DEADLINE: There’s a lot of discourse online about this portrayal of a Black female murderer, a character we don’t really see in media. Where did you settle on her as a person? Should we be sorry for her?

FISHBACK: I approach all my characters the same way. And it’s heart first. And it’s me figuring out what it is. And for her, it was love. She loves Marissa and she loves Ni’Jah. And her love is convoluted. And I don’t know her love in that way, but I know what it means to love my sister and my family. And I think that’s universal for all of us. I never want to make a character just an unrelatable monster. In fact, I will do my very best to find the things that are relatable. This book I love, Auditioning on Camera: An Actor’s Guide by Joseph Hacker, talks about how a character will be what they are no matter what because it’s written that way. So, if a guy is a thief, you don’t have to play him slimy because he’s going to steal anyway. I read that when I was playing Darlene in The Deuce. I realized I don’t have to ‘play’ a sex worker. I don’t have to walk or talk like what we imagine a sex worker to walk or talk like, because she is that no matter what, because those are the given circumstances.

I come from humanity, heart and love, and all of the things that I believe we have to have as human beings. I never tried to play Dre as a scary serial killer that people are freaked out by. And it’s so interesting because people come up to me like, “Yo girl, you scared me. I couldn’t watch it with the lights out.” And I’m like, “Scared you?” And I’m almost jealous that I can’t watch it from that angle. The hardest stuff in acting sometimes comes when it’s the easiest direction, like, ‘She laughs’ or ‘She walks.’ Like in Episode 2, when the strippers joke about Dre having a dead body in her trunk, she laughs [awkwardly]. When reading the script, I’m like, ‘Well, we’re going to see how that laugh goes.’ And then I just throw myself into the moment. And I was really happy that people were responding to that laugh. It was freaky.

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