Dominique Fishback is sitting backstage waiting to discuss her latest role, starring in Amazon Prime Video’s “Swarm,” when her ears perk up at a familiar sound: a revving engine.
From across a partition, an audience watches a particularly tense scene from the show’s fourth episode, titled “Running Scared”, when Fishback’s Dre – a homicidal Ni’jah superfan, a Beyoncé-esque pop star – faces a group of women who stand between her and attend the singer’s concert.
Fishback playfully re-enacts the scene, clutching an imaginary steering wheel and pressing his high-heeled foot on a fake accelerator pedal that sends him flying and crashing into Dre’s latest victims. She makes a funny face and points it for a rep’s cellphone camera, unknowingly demonstrating the kind of dark, comedic energy that makes “Swarm” so newsworthy.
“There’s a lot of physical comedy that [Dre] has to do, and it wasn’t premeditated,” Fishback says, once in front of the crowd for the Q&A, sharing that her love for Lucille Ball and Jim Carrey helped prepare her to play aspects of the quirky personality of the serial killer. .
But creators Donald Glover and Janine Nabers didn’t originally imagine her as Dre. They offered her the role of Marissa, the character’s sensitive sister. “I said to my team, ‘Listen, tell them I’m grateful. But I have to play Dre,'” Fishback recalled.
From the moment she read the script, the character called her. After playing charming characters in ‘The Deuce’, ‘The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey’, ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ and the upcoming ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’, Fishback saw Dre as his chance to make a transformation like Charlize Theron did in “Monster” or Heath Ledger as the Joker in “The Dark Knight.”
“I just felt that in my mind that I could,” Fishback says. “We don’t often have that opportunity – as black artists, as black women – to go beyond what we’ve had the opportunity to do.”
So she held on.
“I don’t want to catch up as an actor,” Fishback told Glover. “What could I do next that excites me? I think of that kid who watched all these movies and said, “I want to do this” and didn’t think of a box or limitations or a genre. She wanted to do everything. His response: “If that’s the role you want, that’s the role you get. …I know you can do it.”
There was no fight, no re-audition. Fishback simply signed on for the role (with Marissa played by Chlöe Bailey), and then the real work began. “I’ll be honest, it was nerve wracking. I was like, ‘Man, what did I do? Why did I want to do this?’ says Fishback.
Playing Dre was physically and emotionally challenging. The actor usually prepares by journaling her character, but this time she wrote as herself. “I didn’t understand her psychologically,” says Fishback. “So I had to keep a journal as myself to eliminate any fear and judgment, because I didn’t want the camera to pick up Dom’s war with herself over playing Dre.”
She also worked with Audrey LeCrone, the dialect coach who guided Fishback’s “Judas” co-star Daniel Kaluuya to an Oscar. Together, they transformed Fishback’s Brooklyn accent into Dre’s southern drag, who borrowed some of her sweetness from “The Queen” (aka Beyoncé, a Houston native).
“It’s all really slow and pretty,” Fishback says, slipping into the character’s Texas accent and then back to his natural language pattern. “Every character I play, I try to take out the Brooklyn, just for now.”
As for the character’s arc, Fishback unpacked Dre’s journey in real time as the writers delivered scripts for future episodes while the series was in production. She realized that she didn’t “need to know Dre’s backstory specifically, because she suppressed it so much that she probably suppressed it for me as well”.
The seven-episode limited series chronicles a two-year period as Dre hits the road in pursuit of his dream of meeting Ni’jah. Fishback is in almost every scene and, in most episodes, surrounded by a new cast of characters, with co-stars such as Bailey, Damson Idris, Kiersey Clemons, Rory Culkin, X Mayo, Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish , in her acting debut.
“It was bittersweet at times, because you got used to Chlöe, then you got used to Paris, and you got used to Billie, then everyone left. But I just decided to take it as a gift,” she says. Being exposed to their different energy and talents “almost felt like acting boot camp.”
Of Eilish in particular, Fishback says the popstar is a “natural” actor. “There was no air around her. She really cared about the character. It was important to me because I spent months on it, and new actors are coming in and you hope everyone cares as much as you do. She really did.
Eilish also had a big job. Her character, Eva – the leader of a female cult whom Dre encounters on her way to a Ni’jah concert – is essential to the story. “You have to believe that Dre can fall under the influence of these women,” says Fishback. “Billie was very intentional with her lines. It helped sell me that Dre could get caught and not just kill everyone on sight.
Because there are a lot of murders on the show, Fishback, who is also a producer, asked to have a therapist on set for these intense scenes.
“You don’t know how people are going to be affected,” she said. “A lot of actors really give themselves to their roles, and then you finish the show, and you go home and you’re on your own. You don’t want to be left in pieces for giving yourself a role.
The actor’s most difficult kill came during the finale. “It was the first kill she did with her bare hands and not with an object,” notes Fishback. “It was very close and personal, so for me it was really difficult.”
In fact, after the scene ended, she couldn’t stop crying. “Am I representing something bad? Fishback said she wondered. “I used to play characters that were considered likeable, or easy to like, or wrap around you. And I wanted to take on the challenge of playing a villain or an anti-hero, but when I was faced with what she had to do, it was tough. But I had a really good support system.
Even though “Swarm” has pushed the limits of Fishback as a performer, she hopes audience behaviors will evolve accordingly. Back then, she explains, if you chose to say trash about someone, you had to meet at 3 p.m. in the schoolyard or parking lot to deal with it. In today’s age of social media, people can be so cold to each other, not considering that there’s a person on the other end of that dig.
“I call [Dre] the ‘pull-up queen’,” Fishback says, laughing as she makes her point. “Dre is kind of like, ‘Talk is cheap, man,’ and she stops at home. I wonder if people watching are going to say, ‘You know what I was going to say on social media, I I won’t say it again.”