The 31-year-old’s childhood dream was simply to be a Broadway chorus boy. These days, he’s working under one of his bucket-list directors in The Mastermind, and for The Savant – sharing a call sheet with Jessica Chastain.

Cole Doman reads The New Yorker, cover-to-cover, every week. He runs from his Dumbo home down Brooklyn Bridge Park to Red Hook and back on a daily basis. He’s just returned from a weekend in Fire Island – the Suffolk County vacation spot that’s been a mecca for the creative and queer communities since the 1930s. He goes to the cinema “constantly”, and has an unending to-read list of fiction he’s always working his way through. And “I’m cooking all the time,” he says. Last night, he whipped up a Moroccan-inspired yoghurt and turmeric chicken dish from the NYT app. 

It’s an idyllic metropolitan existence, shared with his boyfriend. The stuff of dreams for his younger self, a queer kid in Philadelphia with a sole goal of being a chorus boy on Broadway. A glimpse at the 32-year-old actor’s present-day professional fortunes would bowl over his younger counterpart, too. 

He’s been a darling of indie cinema and underground New York theatre for the best part of a decade, since his titular breakout in Stephen Cone’s 2015 coming-of-age picture, Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, following a closeted teenager and son of a high-profile preacher, on his 17th birthday. His 2022 stage debut came in the premiere of Julia May Jones’s Your Own Personal Exegesis – once again a story that saw religion and teenage years coalesce, exploring the shortcomings of a liberal Protestant youth group. Last summer, he was giving eulogies in Other People’s Dead Dads, Jacob Wasson’s debut at Dixon Place Theatre, in which Doman played Ollie – a for-hire funeral mourner, enlisted by families to deliver tributes in place of the father’s missing, estranged or deceased gay sons. “I was on stage for two and a half hours bearing my soul. I was not able to function when I would go home,” he says when we connect over Zoom. Doman’s just returned from one of those morning runs, on a slightly suffocating summer’s day in the city – the type where perspiration endures post-cool-down shower, he tells me. 

In and around the arthouse and experimental projects he’s made a home in, there’s been flirtations with the mainstream, too – a recurring role in The Gossip Girl reboot, for instance. But it’s in AppleTV+’s upcoming crime-thriller The Savant that he’ll decisively meet the masses. The show follows a team anchored by Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain’s Jodi, as they work to intercept online hate groups on the cusp of acts of extremism. Doman is one of her alt-right targets, Steve. From Chastain to another screen legend, he’s also weeks shy, when we chat, of the New York Film Festival screening of The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s flip of an art heist movie, in which he appears alongside Josh O’Connor. “If you’d have asked me five American auteurs that I would want to work with, she would have been on that list,” he beams. Assuming they’re living, ticking off the other four might not be such a pipe dream if Doman’s career trajectory continues at the same velocity. 

Andrew Wright: Hi Cole! We should start with The Mastermind! Tell me about your experience of working with Kelly Reichardt!

Cole Doman: I loved her movies since I first saw Wendy and Lucy. Then I just devoured all of them, so I would have done one line for her, and luckily, I had a couple of small scenes. But I’m thrilled. And I loved getting to work on the movie with Josh O’Connor and Eli Gelb, who is an amazing New York theatre actor. 

AW: What did you learn from Kelly?

CD: What I loved is that I came into it with such admiration and respect for her as a filmmaker and writer, so I trusted her completely. And she also edits her own movies. So if we’re doing a scene and we’ve only gotten coverage from one angle and she says, ‘We’re moving on,’ she means we’re moving on. If I were working with a first-time director or on TV, I would get nervous, like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if we got it.’ But there was something about Kelly’s confidence and vision that I fully trusted, and I was like, ‘Yeah, we got it.’ It was easy, and I left every day of work saying, ‘I know that I did what Kelly asked for, otherwise we would still be there,’ you know?

(Left) Shirt, trousers AMI PARIS; gloves ERNEST W. BAKER; shoes LANVIN, (right) jacket, trousers DSQUARED2; tie VINTAGE CHANEL

AW: From one icon to another, The Savant sees you starring alongside Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain. Can you tell me about your first day on set together?

CD: Well, obviously, I worship Jessica. I find her taste impeccable. The roles she chooses and her range is pretty unmatched. And I remember one week before I got the job, I was watching the SAG Awards – when she won for Tammy Faye and she gave a speech that said something along the lines of, ‘When I was at Juilliard, Philip Seymour Hoffman came into my class and he gave this amazing talk and at the end of the speech where he said, “For all the actors that are struggling, I just want you to know, I believe in you. I see you, and I’ll see you on set.”’ Like ‘Keep going, and I can’t wait to work with you.’ And then literally the next week, I got the job, and I was like, ‘This is a sign. I’m going to see you on set.’ I got to share that with her after our first day, and she was so moved and so generous.

She just really impressed me with her professionalism, grace and kindness. And she was very lovely to me. I understand why she has the success she has because not only is she an incredible talent, but she’s also an incredible leader. 

AW: In The Savant, your character Steve, is part of an online hate group that is being tracked by Jessica’s character, Jodi. What were your first impressions of him?

CD: [I received] a quick blurb – a breakdown of who the character is. I think it said, ‘Slightly overweight, unsure of himself, wears glasses. Not as smart as he thinks he might be.’ And when I saw that, I was like, ‘Okay, that isn’t necessarily who I am, so what is my entry point?’ What I was able to really figure out was that he’s in a really intense alpha-beta power dynamic with [fellow character Steve]. I felt like that was a really good entry point for me in my life of having something to prove, not being so sensitive. So I felt like, in some way, it ended up being a really incredible challenge, but also a good fit. There was something spiritually that made sense.

AW: When you dive into the role and you get to know all his idiosyncrasies and complexities and flaws, do you find it is easier to gain sympathy for him in certain aspects?

I think a lot of actors would say that you can’t really approach any role you’re about to play with any sort of judgment. I can maybe judge his actions, but I don’t judge the person that he is. For me, it was about removing the given circumstances and the exterior actions. It was like, ‘Who is this person? What is he fighting for?’ And he has a girlfriend, and he has two kids that he’s the father-figure for. He doesn’t have a family himself. He had a really bad childhood. And here someone came along and said, ‘This community is the reason why your life didn’t work out the way you thought it should.’ 

AW: I was so interested to read that the show stemmed from a single Cosmopolitan article (“Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before It Happens?”). How much did you research real-life events for this?

CD: I read the article only once when I was auditioning for the show, just to get some context. And unfortunately, in this world we live in, you can throw a stone and you can find racist rhetoric anywhere. So I was very careful about going down any sort of Reddit rabbit hole. I went back to this book that I had read a couple of years ago, called Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, which was sort of the rise of 4chan and how this alt-right movement sprouted. And then I read a book that one of our execs sent to me, called Black Pill by Elle Reeve. As far as research goes, I find that reading is really valuable. But I’m not playing a real person. Steve is not a character in this article, and I feel pretty strongly that whenever you’re not playing a real person, you don’t have to become an investigative journalist. I think it goes back to what I said about, ‘Where do me and Steve… where do our hearts coalesce?’ We’re building a new person, right?  I remember going in for my fitting with our incredible costume designer, Mitchell, and we had this idea that Steve would always wear basketball shorts underneath his jeans. That was part of his look. And I just felt like as soon as I put that on, I felt so much more embodied. It was nothing that research could give me. 

AW: You were shooting in New York. So were you living at home in Brooklyn? 

CD: Yeah, I was living at home with my boyfriend, and we would shoot up in White Plains, New York, so it’s like an hour and a half north of the city. What was amazing was to be able to come home and open the door and just totally remove that layer and not have to take it home with me. We’d order dinner and just watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, and I could be Cole again [laughs]. 

AW: Yeah, Steve’s not watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. Were there conversations with your partner about your days on set? Or did you just leave it all at the door?

CD: This job was particularly challenging, of course, because of the subject matter, but more so than that, there was something that was happening where I was in an environment with a bunch of men. Everyone was so lovely. But pretty much the whole TV show, my character, Steve, is basically being told he’s worthless and he can’t measure up, and he’s doing a bad job. I think there was something about going through that in my body as Cole that was almost a triggering experience, from when I was growing up in middle school, when I was being bullied for not being masculine enough or too sensitive. I’m 32 years old, I have an amazing support system, and no one’s bullying me anymore. But I think there was something about this role in particular that was harder to get out of my head. 

AW: If we could meet you as a teenager, growing up in Philadelphia, what would we have found? What was your vibe?

CD: I was a really sensitive, effeminate gay boy who was in the drama club. I didn’t see this as a viable career because of who I was and where I came from. My family’s not in the industry, and so this dream that I once had of being a chorus boy on Broadway has become this thing that I can’t even quite comprehend still. But I was obsessed with movies. The Oscars were like a national holiday in our house.