Cole Doman Prepares to Level Up

Cole Doman sees about two movies a week, sometimes more. “I chase the cinema,” he proclaims, and he means it. Film was “a religion” in his household growing up. His mother followed the Oscars closely and shaped the family’s viewing around them, so everyone could enjoy the ceremony when spring came. That’s how the actor ended up watching Schindler’s List “way too young.” For years, Doman’s taste was predicated on hers, and he only built a relationship with world cinema of his own after he left home, when he found the French New Wave, Eric Rohmer, Christian Petzold. It arrived, he recalls, “at the right time.” “In my twenties, I felt like I could really appreciate it,” he adds, “whereas a lot of things might have gone over my head had I watched these movies younger.”

Doman came to screen acting by way of the stage. He trained at Steppenwolf and spent his early years in Chicago’s non-Equity storefront scene, where the audience often sat close enough to touch. Representation followed those small plays, and one of his first on-camera auditions landed him the title role in Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, in which he played a closeted churchgoing teenager coming to terms with his sexuality on the eve of his seventeenth birthday. Since then, he has moved between independent film and television, and this era brings three projects at once: The Savant, a thriller for Apple TV+; Kennedy, in which he plays Lem Billings, John F. Kennedy’s gay lifelong friend, across the formative years of the prominent political dynasty; and Before I Do, Gary Jaffe’s gay romantic comedy which premiered at Frameline and screened at Outfest. He is candid about his standing in the industry. “I am an indie-darling indie-person who has been sort of crawling and loving the crawl,” he declares, “but having to fight a little bit harder to get things seen.”

The memory of the proximity from his early days has never left him. “You could be in a big space, a thousand seats, or you could be in a play that has thirty seats and the audience is right in front of you,” he remembers of his first years on stage. When he made Henry Gamble, Cone helped him see that the camera was not so different from the front row: “When I did my first film, and the camera was similarly right in front of [me], it’s not as disorienting as you might think.” The two mediums aren’t the same. Screen work, he notes, “still requires, in my opinion, technique and stamina.” But the closeness carried over.

Henry, he explains, “is an observer,” and the part suited a beginner. The ensemble mixed Steppenwolf alumni with mid-career actors and novices like himself, and Doman treated the set as a classroom. “I would stand at the monitor and watch takes; I just tried to soak in as much as possible,” he describes, taking note of what people asked for, what they needed, what was received well. “Nowadays, when I’m reading scripts and considering doing films, I’m still chasing that first experience. It still looms so large for me.”

For a while, the thing he was chasing was hard to find. Out of school, the roles that arrived belonged to the era of the “sassy gay secretary or sassy gay friend,” and Doman “always was at odds with that.” Work was work, but the compromise cost something: “It felt like I had to bastardize a version of my craft to do these things.” So he made a project instead, with his best friend, the filmmaker Antonio Marziale. “Starfuckers,” a 2022 Sundance short, follows an intimate evening between a director and an escort that is interrupted by a familiar face. The two filmmakers had met in Los Angeles, both auditioning for things they didn’t care about, and decided to stop waiting. They wanted “to make something that, if it landed in our inbox, we would be really excited about,” Doman explains. For months, they sat in a room and spitballed, asking how to think about queerness and performance as a means to heal trauma. They built the outline together and improvised scenes. Marziale wrote the final script, including what Doman calls “the big monologue that’s so gorgeous.” “The project is a reflection of our collaboration and our friendship,” he adds.

“Starfuckers” afforded him a community—Doman moved to Brooklyn, home to what he calls a “very burgeoning new class of independent film directors,” and made a practice of introduction. Send me your short film. Let me read your script. “I just want to meet people who are working today,” he says. The economics of getting a project off the ground have barely moved. “It’s still really hard to get those great queer films made,” and the ones that do get made “are reserved for a very small echelon of talent that have been on a massively popular TV show” and the fan base that affords them. Everyone else crawls.

Trust is what he builds first, before anything else. For Mutt, Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s 2023 debut, the two actors spent days before shooting hashing out every scene. The film follows twenty-four hours in the life of Feña (Lío Mehiel), a young trans man reconnecting with his estranged ex-boyfriend, John, played by Doman. The pair of actors had never met, so they went for drinks, “a little date” to build chemistry from nothing. The film runs on unspoken history rather than exposition, which meant the history had to be invented, then navigated mindfully. “I had to really honor where he was coming from,” Doman offers, a place that “maybe didn’t always align with the right way to think about transition, or how we would talk about it in a politically correct way. [Lío] is someone who was personally affected.” The trust between the actors, and Mehiel’s presence in the role, created what he calls “a safety,” the assurance that he “wasn’t some sort of transphobe coming in to storm all over the project.” “We handled it with a lot of care, and I think that’s what’s reflected in the film. I’m proud of that,” Doman adds.

Kennedy, asked for something different, hinging less on trust than on immersion. Playing Billings, a figure “of history that very few people know about,” delighted Doman precisely because there was no received performance to imitate. There was instead Fredrik Logevall’s JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, “the bible of the book that it’s based on,” which he read cover to cover to absorb the lore “from the potato famine up till World War II, which is where our season ends.” The questions he brought to it were sociological: how boys at prep school signaled to a gay classmate; what it would cost Billings to confide in his best friend about his sexuality, if he did; what it meant that they stayed close their entire lives; what Billings gave up to keep his standing. “It was really more a history exercise than a character-driven exercise,” Doman concedes. Spanning a decade of Billings’s life, from adolescence into early adulthood, the role tracks self-discovery, “what is exciting about that, what’s scary about that,” and the actor is gratified that the scripts resisted the obvious: “He could have easily been relegated to a side character in a different version of this show, come in for a blip, and they check their box. That wasn’t what was done here.” The period took care of the rest. “You’d be surprised how quickly you fall into this embodiment of the time when you have the 1930s suit on and you’re in a dream room that looks like the 1930s,” he describes, recalling a set where every book on the table was a real book from the era, the posture came naturally when donning the clothing, and the dialogue was already period-appropriate. “It’s about almost surrendering,” he says, “and letting yourself be curious and inspired by it instead of fighting against it.”

The Savant, which stars Jessica Chastain as a woman who infiltrates and investigates online hate groups, occupies a different dimension. By the time it arrived, Doman had accrued recurring and guest-star roles on major shows, so “it wasn’t like I was stepping onto some massive set for the first time and being like, What the fuck is going on?” But the job landed just before a strike pushed production seven months, leaving all eight scripts in his hands. “It just percolates, sometimes in the background, and it does a lot of the work for you just by being present with you,” he reflects of the delay. The show shot all eight episodes at once, out of order, a scene from episode one the day before one from episode eight, so he kept a running map of his character’s emotional temperature and flagged pacing to the director whenever the thriller’s engine ran hot or cold: “I feel like we’re getting here too quickly or too slowly. I want to connect this dot.”

Audiences have yet to see any of it. Apple TV+ indefinitely postponed the series days before its scheduled premiere in September 2025, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and it has sat unreleased ever since, with no new date announced. Doman chooses his words carefully when the subject turns to the role itself—his character is a white supremacist. “There’s not a lot I can say that I want people to learn from him, because he has ill intent,” he admits. His way into the character hinged in no small way on the male loneliness epidemic, and a man he imagines “outside of myself who maybe grew up in a broken home in Indiana, whose father wasn’t around, who wasn’t good at sports,” isolated from any male community until a voice on a message board supplies an explanation for his woes. “I can imagine someone in that position desperately needing to attach themselves to something, a cause, to make sense of their own lot in life,” he muses. “So I have empathy for that. I do.” The hope, he adds, is that television’s extremity might point toward a more faceted discussion on the topic: “There needs to be some sort of rehabilitation and not prosecution.”

Hearing him talk that way, it’s hard not to think about the pandemic. Doman spent months training as a crisis counselor with the Trevor Project, then six months on the phones with LGBTQ+ youth in distress. “That was one of the most meaningful things I’ve done,” he says. “It felt like I was healing a part of my childhood self who was deeply depressed and lost and lonely.” The organization’s work is “imperative to our youth, especially what’s happening to our trans community,” and he urges anyone who thinks they could handle it to look into the training. “It’s incredibly rewarding.”

The newest project is also the lightest. Before I Do, Gary Jaffe’s rom-com with an all-gay cast, premiered earlier this year at Frameline at the Castro and screened at Outfest. Doman appears alongside Michael Hsu Rosen, Nico Greetham, Robin de Jesús, and Jared Reinfeldt. He synopsizes it with relish: “a gay My Best Friend’s Wedding at a cabin with five friends in the Berkshires.” It is not a coming-out story. It is about the moment, familiar to anyone in their late twenties and early thirties, when friend groups begin to drift. “Certain lives begin to click into place. People get married. Some people have kids. Other people get fancier jobs, or they can’t get a job. Some people feel left behind. Some people feel like they’re being outgrown,” he expresses. Within a gay male friend group, he thinks the stakes are “even more complicated,” because “some of us don’t want to grow up and others are rushing to grow up.” He is, by his own cheerful admission, an indie darling plugging an indie project. “It’s a little-engine-that-could, tiny indie, and I want it to do well.” The movie is “so lovely,” he says, and “very funny,” and it “scratches that itch that everyone is always looking for on a Sunday morning,” the itch that keeps a man going to the movies twice a week. For an actor who spent his first years learning in the dark of other people’s films, there would be worse fates than continuing to create and enjoy his own.