Considering her standout supporting roles on “The Deuce” and “Show Me a Hero” (both from HBO and showrunner David Simon) and in the highly anticipated feature “The Hate U Give” this fall—plus what’s being cited as her breakout leading turn in Jordana Spiro’s indie debut, “Night Comes On,” and her credits as a playwright and screenwriter—it’s safe to say that Dominique Fishback is a major new talent who just keeps on rising. She recently sat with Backstage to tease what’s to come on Season 2 of “The Deuce” (premiering Sept. 9) and discuss carrying Spiro’s drama as Angel, a troubled teen fresh out of juvenile detention who, along with her younger sister, sets out to find their estranged father.
Fishback seeks out what scares her.
“I read an article [in which] Taraji P. Henson talked about how Cookie [on ‘Empire’] scared her, and that’s how she decides if she wants to take a role. If it scares her, then she knows that there’s something about it that is calling her. When it came to actually being nude [on ‘The Deuce’], it didn’t scare me, but you’re portraying a sex worker in the ’70s, and it’s a taboo topic, and it wasn’t going to be painted in a flowery way because that’s not how [Simon] writes. I knew that we would get real characters and characters with heart and soul.”
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Her latest projects highlight the stories she wants to tell.
“I feel so fortunate that the things that I care about, the stories that are not really told all the time, happen to be what I get to do. ‘The Hate U Give’ is my first studio feature, and it gets to be about a topic that is really important to me: police brutality. But I will say it’s so funny, because I play all of these dramatic characters but I’m really more silly than that, so [audiences] don’t get to see that. I’m such a romantic. They’ll be like, ‘What are you watching?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m watching “Vampire Diaries” for the fifth time!’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ shows on Freeform… I like the teenybopper shows.”
She has begun journaling as her various characters.
“I started it with ‘Show Me a Hero.’ I would take a scene and I would put music to the scene, and then I would summarize the scene. But as a summary, it started becoming me saying, ‘I wish this person would just do this.’ So it’s not anything that was actually said in the script, it’s more like an intuition between me and the character that would start to come out.”
Survival jobs don’t always go as planned.
“I worked at a Regal movie theater, which I thought was a good idea because I was like, Oh yeah, I’m gonna be in the [film] world a little bit! But then I started popping popcorn and was like, I need to be in those movies, I don’t need to be popping this popcorn. So that was kind of a bust.”
Focus on the craft and success will come.
“When the time is right, an agent will find you. You just have to work on the craft. So I thought, I love Meryl Streep and I think that she changes in everything she does, she transforms. I said, ‘I want to be able to do that. I want to be able to transform. So I’m going to focus more on the craft than [on] getting an agent.’ And once I did that, it started coming to me.”
Make yourself stand out by writing your own work.
“It’s really important to write. I think a lot of people feel like they can’t write, but that’s where everything is going right now, and in order to stand out from the crowd of all these people who are here to act, [you have to] create your own stuff. When you create content that you really care about, people notice and they’re attracted to it.”
Ready to get to work? Check out Backstage’s New York City audition listings!