[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for The Madness.]

The Big Picture

‘The Netflix series ‘The Madness is a conspiracy thriller following Muncie Daniels, played by Colman Domingo, as he’s framed for a murder he witnessed.
Domingo’s involvement in creating Muncie’s wardrobe was very thoughtful and intentional.
The title ‘The Madness’ has complex meanings that evolve throughout the series, touching on disinformation and family dynamics.

The eight-episode Netflix drama series The Madness is a conspiracy thriller of the highest level, following political media pundit Muncie Daniels (Colman Domingo) as he unravels the mystery of who’s trying to frame him for murder. When he finds a very dead white supremacist while in the Poconos to write a novel, Muncie learns that there are few people he can really trust and even fewer who are actually willing to help him get his life back. And while trying to clear his name puts his family in danger, it also brings them together and helps them reconnect in a way that just might heal the wounds that distance between them had created.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Domingo, who’s amassing quite a collection of memorable characters, talked about wanted to be very involved with the story Muncie’s wardrobe was telling, being very thoughtful about every moment, how the madness represents different things throughout the season, the very realistic-looking body parts his character discovers, how he might have handled this situation compared to the way Muncie did, complicated family relationships, and that deeply emotional moment between Muncie and his son (Thaddeus Mixson). He also discussed wanting to be seen as an actor capable of playing both the hero and the villain, as well as the challenge of getting what he wants to do in his career to line up with what’s available to him.

Colman Domingo Wanted Muncie Daniels’ Wardrobe Choices in ‘The Madness’ To Have Meaning
Image via Netflix

Collider: First, on a personal note, I just want to say that I love a man who is willing to take risks with fashion and to use it as an expression of character and self. Did you have any specific say in the fashion of Muncie Daniels? We see him go from business suits to sweatsuits in this. When you play a character, do you like to be involved in how he dresses, or do you prefer to hand yourself over to the vision?

COLMAN DOMINGO: I’m very involved. Avery Plewes, my costume designer, is phenomenal and she really was very thoughtful with the arc of Muncie. We wanted to make Muncie iconic, as well. So, it was taking our notes from Three Days of the Condor, where Robert Redford basically had one outfit on, that transformed into four or five, which was interesting. We looked at that as a reference, and also North by Northwest, keeping this everyman who’s not gonna have too many changes, but when he changes, it’s also a psychological change. So, it’s never just clothes. Everything makes so much sense, even how precise the fits are and why. We would go back and forth. We had fitting after fitting. This is hours of fittings that we had for Muncie Daniels, and making sure that the peacoat was truly an iconic peacoat. We wanted the series to live in this space of the 1960s and 1970s, especially knowing that (director) Clement Virgo’s framing of shots felt like a bit of a throwback. It felt like these 1970s films, with these very long single shots and frames, so it had to have an iconic feel.

So, I very much like to be involved because it’s all I know. You can’t just throw a hat on me. I have to have a story about the hat, or why the hat is the way it is, or why he flips the collar when he flips it. I have a reason for everything. When he decides to wear sunglasses, what is he trying to do with them? Why that color? Why that lens? There are his shoes. And then, when he switches into that very ordinary sweatsuit, he’s trying to look, in his mind, like the most average Black man in America getting a bus, yet he’s got these beautiful Ray-Ban frames on, which is a little bit of a dead giveaway. He still can’t completely conform. He’s still looking a little elevated in some way, shape or form. It was very thoughtful, in that way.

So, it’s not just about the perfect coat, but the perfect collar too.

DOMINGO: Exactly. He’s a character who does have a sense of style, but it’s all manufactured. Once he elevated himself in his career and his life, and he’s a celebrity and a public person, he does have a persona. So, even when he goes into that store in New York, that ordinary shop to get a sweatsuit and a New York City t-shirt, he thought he was just gonna get something ordinary, but he found the one that fits him well.

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You recently pointed out that you could be Bond or a Bond villain, which I thought was a really interesting statement. Has that been a goal for your career, in terms of never being seen as only the hero or only the bad guy? Were you always hoping to get to a point where you weren’t pigeonholed as one or the other, and that you’d make that decision harder for the people responsible for making those decisions?

DOMINGO: I think so. It’s always been that way. Listen, I know the container that I live in, and I know there’s a lot put on me, of what I can be or what I can play or what I can achieve. I liberated myself from those beliefs, early in my career. So, by the time last year came around, and people were screening Rustin and also screening The Color Purple at the same time, it shows exactly what I’ve been trying to craft for my career, for a very long time. I can play the villain, and I can play the hero. I can play soft, and I can play hard. I can play an action hero, and I can also do a half-hour comedy. I haven’t put limitations on myself. I like to have a deep dive and go into these really interesting, curious places. It’s always a good challenge for me. Everything that I do is a challenge for myself, and I never wanna do the same thing that I’ve done before.

The Title of ‘The Madness’ Takes on Different Meanings Throughout the Season

The title of this, The Madness, could encompass so many different things, and it could also change meaning throughout, as all the events are unfolding. What did the title represent and mean for you, and did it mean something different for you at the beginning of the shoot than it did by the end?

DOMINGO: That’s an extraordinary question because it did. It kept transforming what I believe the madness was. Is the madness an internal question? Is it more about disinformation and what you’re downloading on the daily, which is maddening? You can’t even sift through to get to the truth anymore because the truth is now challenged on the daily. That’s maddening. But also, even his own internal struggles with his family and feeling disconnected from community feels like madness, and also how it keeps shifting. Even when he just does something ordinary, just walking down the street, looking at the things that seem ordinary, but should not be ordinary, in any way, shape or form. In a place like New York, there are strange things happening at all times, and New Yorkers are just walking right through it like it’s not happening. That’s pure madness. What Stephen Belber and VJ Boys, my showrunners, are trying to say with the series is to just ask questions and look around. Don’t just take something as being normal, but actually maybe you need to do something about it. You need to take part in it. We have so much coming at us that we distill what we can actually take. In that way, it’s a form of madness, as well. By saying, “I’m shutting off all the noise in the world and just being in my own bubble,” that’s madness. I think they’re trying to get you to just think, take in, try to help figure this out, and we can figure this out together to make it so that there’s some more normalcy in the world, whatever that is.

When you had to open the sauna out in the Poconos and look inside and find this head and those pieces of a body, were those molded pieces of a body on the floor?

DOMINGO: No, that was an actual body that we cut up. No, I’m joking! I’m totally kidding. It’s funny, I read that script when I was on my last season of Fear the Walking Dead. We were shooting on a plantation in Savannah, Georgia, which is a lot to take in, and I was reading the script and I got terrified of just the image of a chopped up body that he was witnessing. What does that do to a person when that’s so outside of their realm? Here’s someone who talks about war and the horrors of the world on CNN, but now he’s confronted with it. What does that do to a person? And then, there’s a great sleight of hand where he almost has to question if he saw what he saw because everyone else is questioning it when it’s not there the next day. That’s a form of madness, too. “Did I see what I saw? What is real?” So, when we did that, yeah, it was molded pieces, but our effects department made it look so gory and awful that it really did affect me, viscerally. They did a great job.

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As you read these scripts and you learned about the character’s actions, did you ever think, “Man, I would have handled that differently”? Could you see yourself having played this out the same way your character did, or were you thinking about what you might have done differently, along the way?

DOMINGO: I watched the preview for another dystopian end of the world series, and they were like, “We wanna try to stay alive for as long as I can.” And I literally said out loud, “Why? Why would you do that? I don’t wanna do that.” I guess that’s really who I am. In a situation like this, I don’t know if I would do what Muncie does. Even going to the neighbor’s house is probably something I just wouldn’t do. I’d be like, “Oh, my generator’s out. I don’t have wifi or electricity. I’m just gonna chill tonight and stay in the house. And then, when it’s daylight, I’ll go out and do what I need to do.” I think Muncie lives in a bubble, believing that he has more access and agency and that it’s fine to be like, “I’ll go ask the stranger who said to come by.” And it does seem perfectly normal, but he also needs to know that he’s in the Pocono Mountains, and you never know who your neighbors are or what could be used against you or what could be in your benefit? I’m very aware of the world that I live in. I’m not trying to go to some neighbor’s house, uninvited. I would probably shout from a distance. That’s as far as I’d go.

Muncie has complicated relationships with everybody.

DOMINGO: None of them are healthy.

Every Character in ‘The Madness’ Is Working Through Something And Muncie Daniels Is at the Center of It All
Image via Netflix

Is there something particularly fun and interesting about digging into the dynamics of a family, when they’re supposed to be the people that you’re closest to, but that’s just not the case?

DOMINGO: Every single character is really working through something, and Muncie doesn’t realize he’s the center of a lot of that. He affects a lot of people with his choices or his actions or his inaction. Marsha Stephanie Blake plays my wife, and she always gives me a little pushback. You see that there’s still love there, but there are also a lot of issues. I love that they’re not clear issues. I love that we don’t point out exactly what the issue was. That was a very conscious decision, what exactly happened. It could be something more existential, of where they are in their lives, which I think is interesting. It’s more complex, in that way. It doesn’t just say, “Oh, this was the issue.” No, there are many that led them to this. But the relationship with his son and also with his daughter, I love that they’re very complicated. As he’s trying to navigate his world and advocate for himself out in the world, he also has to do some deep work on the past and heal these broken relationships in his own family. That will create more of a whole person to move forward with.

One of the most standout moments for me is in the last episode, when Muncie goes after Demetrius and stops him from doing anything with the gun. That emotional breakdown moment between them was a lot. What was it like to shoot that with Thaddeus Mixson? What was it like to be in that moment?

DOMINGO: First of all, I loved working with him. He’s so open and lovely, and he’s also very strong. Muncie almost doesn’t know what to do with his son, who’s leaning in a different direction than Muncie. He can’t control him. But also, his son is reacting and being reactionary to everything that Muncie is and what built him. That’s a very common thing. At the end of the day, it’s a father-son relationship and they’re complicated, especially with him becoming a man and challenging his father. And so, when he gets to that point where it’s almost physical, it’s heartbreaking. He’s trying to find the tools to be a better father, but he just doesn’t have it. He’s dealing with this young man growing up in the world who has his own needs and wants and ways about doing things. He’s trying to teach his son how to be in the world. It raises a question of, who’s right? Maybe you need a little bit of both. The son says, “I want you to do something. You don’t do anything. You just talk.” Muncie believes that by talking, you can do something. But I think there needs to be a healthy balance. He’s not saying you’ve gotta do it the Malcolm X way. Maybe you’ve gotta be a little bit Martin [Luther King Jr.] and a little bit Malcom, at the same time.

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Where do you go from here? Do you know what you’re going to be shooting next? How do you get what you want to do to line up with what is available to you?

DOMINGO: Oh, that’s a great question. What do I want and what’s available? I always think it’s a little bit of the same thing. I can never point to exactly what I want because I feel like maybe someone’s writing it and creating the thing that’s new and interesting, and they can help me pour a lot of things that I’m aligned with, or trying to discover about myself and my place in the world. I’m just always open to see what is coming my way. I’m also navigating the things that I build as a writer, director, or actor. I feel like The Madness is very much aligned with a lot of the work that I care about right now. The fact that, in succession, it’s been The Color Purple, Rustin, Sing Sing, and The Madness, I feel like they also live in the same space, in some way, shape or form. It’s really thinking about our culture, about society, about Black men and how they’re perceived in the world, and the journey of that. That’s something that I’m very deeply interested in right now. The fact that it’s taking on different shapes and periods and forms, whether it’s the prison industrial complex, rural Georgia, or organizing the March on Washington, I think Muncie Daniels falls in line with all of these men in a very complicated way, for us to really re-examine who we are in the world and what we’re gonna be, and then how society also views us.

The Madness Muncie Daniels is a political consultant-turned-TV pundit who may have lost his way in life. While on a work sabbatical in the Poconos to write the great American novel, Muncie finds himself the only witness to the murder of a well-known white supremacist, and now he’s being framed for the crime. Muncie is forced to go on the run in a desperate fight to clear his name and unravel a global conspiracy before time runs out. Along the way he’ll reconnect with his family, find unlikely allies, and fight against disinformation in a post-truth age.Release Date November 28, 2024 Network Netflix Directors Clement Virgo

The Madness is available to stream on Netflix. Check out the trailer:

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