Colman Domingo and Clement Virgo unpack their new paranoid political thriller series

CBC

01-12-2024

Remember Sound of Freedom, the "based on a true story" blockbuster about a former U.S. agent's anti-sex trafficking organization named Operation Underground Railroad (OUR)? The movie became a rallying point for QAnon types and several far-right groups who were then embraced by its controversial star Jim Caviezel.
Sure, on the surface, Sound of Freedom is a functional but unremarkable thriller that latches onto our very real empathy for vulnerable victims of child-trafficking. Much of its audience took it as just that. But it's also a movie that inflates statistics as far as child-trafficking is concerned, and then ends with a note declaring that there's more slavery today than there was during slavery, as though it's a competition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Operation Underground Railroad popped up the same year as Black Lives Matter.
"Images and media are always laced with a context, and laced with a sense of history," says Canadian filmmaker Clement Virgo, after I describe Sound of Freedom, and the response from many of its supporters who were so angered by my criticism that they tried to paint me as a pedophile online. "What is behind that history?"
"Think about who's giving you that information and why," says actor Colman Domingo, in a separate conversation, speaking to the extreme divisiveness on social media spurred on by its many prominent and polarizing voices. "Who does it benefit for us not to be on the same page, when they keep stoking those fires, saying continue to believe what you believe and keep yourself separate from the other? That's exactly what our series is about."
Their series is The Madness, a shot-in-Toronto conspiracy thriller created by Stephen Belber about a prominent CNN pundit and professor named Muncie (Domingo) who is framed for the murder of a far-right online personality. Virgo, the pioneering filmmaker who captured the underrepresented Black experience in Canada with films like Rude and Brother (he also directed the iconic "f–k" episode in The Wire 's first season) directs four of the Netflix series' eight episodes. He brings influences like the post-Watergate thriller The Parallax View and its predecessors like Hitchcock's The 39 Steps and North By Northwest to a story about today's intense, algo-fueled culture wars.
I'm speaking to both men consecutively on separate Zoom calls. Domingo — currently winning praise and awards season hype for his soul-shaking performance opposite George "Divine Eye" Maclin in the prison drama Sing Sing — is in LA, participating in The Madness 's press tour. Virgo is in his Toronto home, gearing up to join his star on the West Coast.
The two speak fondly of each other, having become good friends during the making of The Madness. Domingo goes as far as suggesting he'll work with Virgo for the rest of his life (let's hold him to it!).
What's especially funny about this relationship is how, in conversation, the two come off as opposites. Domingo is always effusive, a theatre guy who finds the music in words and elaborates so eloquently that he only leaves me the room to ask so many questions in a tight interview time frame. Whereas Virgo is always more whispery and observant, taking his time to formulate insightful responses that pack so much punch in just a few words. Even during our interview, he left me to blabber on while, it seemed, he was studying me.
"He's inside of the character with me," says Domingo about Virgo, "almost like psychologically, as he's building the world around me. He's also holding a bit of his interior life with me. We would have these non-verbal conversations. He would just come over and look at me between takes. He had a question, trying to figure something out. We'd stare at each other. At some point I would just offer up what I think he may be thinking, and he'll say 'try that.' … Smart people don't immediately have to say anything."
Domingo goes on to say that Virgo ended up rubbing off on his character Muncie as he navigates today's cultural minefield. He's a public figure targeted in a sensational plot where his politics make him the perfect figure to hang a murder on.
The wrong man circumstances kick in when Muncie rents a lavish lakefront cottage for a writing retreat. When the power goes out in his cottage, Muncie wanders over to a neighbouring villa and discovers a chopped up white supremacist and the hired goons left to dispose of him. Muncie becomes a fugitive, searching for allies, navigating the ulterior motives behind both far right and antifa agitators, and the shadowy corporate interests puppeteering them.
The series is as paranoid as they get but it taps into a very real anxiety that keeps anyone in media, or just social media, up at night; where taking a stand or staking a position on issues that have grown increasingly divisive — whether related to race or class or personal freedoms — will leave all of us feeling like we have a target on our backs. Sure, most of us don't have to fear masked gun men. In a culture lived on social media, invasive people with their cameras out are scary enough.
"We live in a world, where there's so much clickbait," says Domingo. "Everyone's looking for an 'I got you' moment. … Everything that we do can be turned against us. I understand that my words have power and I understand the platform that I'm on. I understand that my words can always be twisted and turned. I've been in situations where people come up and try to use something, even a simple moment and turn it into their moment."
It's that anxiety that Virgo says keeps him away from posting on social media, or even consuming it too much, since algorithms get the most out of extreme emotions — simple binaries, stirring debates that leave very little room for empathy and nuance. "How do you win against a very sophisticated system designed to feed you, to get you to react," asks Virgo.
In The Madness he filters all this through the Black experience, exploring with a character who is wary of both the far-right and the more extreme personalities on the left. Muncie is a centrist who, as Virgo explains, also happens to live in a more elitist bubble. He plays into respectability politics by thinking he's privileged enough to be protected from the realities others in the Black community have to live with. Being framed for murder shocks him back into the real world, where a Black person speaking up for themselves can be painted as aggression. "At the end of the day," says Domingo, "they strip away his college degrees and celebrity and he's just another Black person. He's realizing who he is again in America."