Dominique Fishback Is Right Where She Wants to Be

March 21 marks the start of Aries season—a time for being bold, brash, and passionate. It's also, maybe not coincidentally, just one day before Dominique Fishback's birthday.

This Aries season kicked off shortly after Fishback's Prime Video series, Swarm, premiered, taking over Internet discourse and altering the course of her career. Co-created by Janine Nabers and Donald Glover (and featuring Malia Obama in the writers' room), the show follows a superfan of the fictional pop star Ni'jah (not not meant to symbolize Beyoncé ) who, in the depths of her own personal trauma, begins slashing the throat of anyone who speaks ill of her favorite singer. There's a robust conversation happening right now about the show's portrayal of Black women and its commentary on stan culture, and not all of it is positive, but everyone seems to agree: Fishback is a real talent.

Her portrayal of Dre is immensely layered. She gives Dre a plausible interior as a woman who wants to be loved but is looking for it in all the wrong ways. Fishback is often downright hilarious—watch her scene with Paris Jackson when her character claims she's half-Black. She infuses Dre's physicality with a comedic awkwardness, making even a stripping scene feel like a bizarre train wreck you can't stop watching. If you've seen Fishback's previous work, whether in David Simons's The Deuce or Show Me a Hero or her knockout performance as Deborah Johnson in 2021's Judas and the Black Messiah, you already know this. But the role of Dre has pushed her further—and put her in squarely in the spotlight.

Reached via Zoom a week after her birthday, which she spent flying back to Atlanta to continue work on her upcoming one-woman show, Fishback is in a reflective mood. She's thinking about the journals she's been keeping for years. "I could find one that says, 'I really want to love myself,' from 2017," she says. "But it was 2019 where I was like, 'Oh, man, do I love myself? Or do I just love my artistry?' because there's a difference between really loving yourself and loving yourself for what you can do," she muses. "To see the outpouring of love for the show, for Dre, for me as an artist, for me as a person, for the way I think about things, to receive the outpouring of love, it was beautiful. It has been a really celebratory time."

Loving her art is something that comes easily for her. Even in college, she was more interested in refining her skills than in finding immediate representation. "I remember thinking, I'm just going to focus on craft, because when I get the opportunity, whether or not somebody likes every project that I do, they won't be able to say, 'She can't act.' That's how I felt about Meryl Streep. She transforms in everything. Even if you don't like a movie that she did, you're not going to be able to say she can't act."

Playing Dre was a role that pushed Fishback into places she had never gone before—especially as a Black actress—and the preparation process came with its own challenges. "When I decided that I wanted to do the role, I was used to playing characters who are easier to understand or that I have easier access to as a person," she says. "I was very particular about how Dre is presented, what she represents, and asking questions, and making sure that different parts of her personality was in the script. I don't control the edit. I don't control the words, but I had to just speak up for what I believed and talked to Janine about it."

This role allowed her to play around with the physical, be it gorging herself on junk food post-murder or beating another character to a pulp. A self-described comedy nerd, Fishback loves the way comedians like Lucille Ball and Jim Carrey use their bodies in their work. She says she had a fair amount of creative freedom in the ways that Dre walked, talked, moved. "Adamma Ebo—she directed three episodes, and she was a grounding factor for me in just allowing me to play," Fishback says. "I didn't want to do Dre a disservice by making it feel like she has no rhyme or reason [to how she acts]. Maybe the audience won't know her rhyme or reason, but she will have one. If it's up to me, she will have one."

Fishback says that when she was preparing for the role, she asked Nabers and Glover how to approach Dre and was told that the character was "emotionally stunted." But she knew she needed to go deeper than that, especially given the historic portrayals of Black women in media. "We as Black women have been looking for opportunities to see ourselves in different worlds. So many people have tweeted at me about horror, how they loved [the show], and how it was so nice to see a character like Dre, because they'd never seen it before," she says.

In a recent Vulture profile of Fishback, Glover described telling her to approach Dre as more "animal than human." The line went viral, sparking a necessary discussion about Glover's history of misogynoir and the show's portrayal of Black women. Fishback says she doesn't remember that particular conversation, because there were so many happening at the same time. But she knew where she wanted Dre to be coming from, and that was most important.

"I just thought, What is the thing that I could relate to with Dre? I could relate to the fact that she loves Ni'jah and she loves her sister," she adds. "And anybody watching it knows what it means to love somebody—obviously, not to the extent that Dre goes in the show, but the impetus to seed the way into Dre's humanity is love, so that's what I did."

While the series is full of horror and heartbreak, the final episode gives us a vision of Dre getting the love she longs for, with her family and her girlfriend, Rashida (Kiersey Clemons), accepting her with open arms. At this point in the series, Dre has morphed into Tony, a swaggy, silent butch residing in Atlanta. For Fishback, who is currently working on a one-woman show where she plays 22 different characters, morphing into Tony was a fun experience. She says she appreciated the fluidity the show allowed: Dre's sexuality is never fully pinned down, and it's never explained whether Tony has emerged from Dre's subconscious or is just her way of running from the cops.

“I hung out with a lot of guys growing up. I played a lot of basketball and football, and so I emulated that. There's moments where she's talking to Rashida and she's about to lie and she's flirting, so she touches Rashida's hair. And I'm like, 'That's what y'all do.' Or the chin-up when Rashida was disappointed about the roses, and I do the little chin-up thing. I said, 'Man, I learned that from y'all.' I just did what I liked."

When it comes to talking about what she wants to do next, she gesticulates wildly, making it clear that every option is on the table. "I've been acting since I was 15. I didn't know how much work it was going to be to do Dre, but nothing could ever prepare you for something like that." Right now, she's ready to try anything and everything. She's written a television pilot, and she's reworking her one-woman show (titled Subverted) in Atlanta. She wants to try making her own music, write a poetic memoir, and act in a romantic comedy. (She often describes herself as the "Black Jessica Day," a nod to her favorite comedy—New Girl—and, of course, her favorite episode is when Nick and Jess finally kiss.)

And she's beginning to consider what kind of legacy she wants to create. "I'm thinking about when I have kids, or what I leave behind for my family, or what I show my 17-year-old sister. You know what I mean?"

Still, we haven't quite left Aries season—a time of beginnings. Fishback is only starting to reflect on what the Swarm experience has taught her, but she says she'll carry the lessons with her. "You hear so many stories, especially being a young Black artist. You don't want to be considered difficult. And I learned that it's not being difficult—it's actually just being true and speaking up. When I do a project, it's because I care about the project. I care about the other creatives involved. I care about the character, and I care about the audience. So if that's my main objective, then I don't have to fear anything."