The Actor Roundtable: Daniel Craig, Paul Mescal and Colman Domingo on Impostor Syndrome and the Dark Roles Women Love

Former James Bond Daniel Craig, The Pianist Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Euphoria Emmy winner Colman Domingo, Marvel superhero turned Emmy nominee Sebastian Stan, consummate character actor Peter Sarsgaard and Oscar-nominated heartthrob Paul Mescal range in age from 28 (Mescal) to 56 (Craig); hail from around the world (America, England, Ireland and Romania); and forged very different paths to stardom. But they all share one thing in common: Each gave a standout performance in a 2024 film — or, in Stan’s case, two — that led to them congregating in mid-November at Soho House West Hollywood for THR‘s annual Actor Roundtable.

Their characters are unforgettable: a Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America (Brody in The Brutalist); a gay American addict in 1950s Mexico (Craig in Queer); an incarceree who finds purpose in art (Domingo in Sing Sing); an angry young man set on destroying the city that betrayed him (Mescal in Gladiator II); a TV exec who oversees live coverage of a terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics (Sarsgaard in September 5); a disfigured actor who undergoes facial reconstructive surgery (Stan in A Different Man); and a striving young Donald Trump (Stan in The Apprentice). So, too, was their conversation.

Let’s talk about how these projects came to you. Daniel, after your Bond chapter — five films over 15 years — how did you wind up hearing from Luca Guadagnino, whom you’d met before any of that?

DANIEL CRAIG I had no plan whatsoever. I was like, “Maybe I’ll never work again.” But there’s a movie I did quite a few years ago called Love Is the Devil, which Luca is a big fan of. I play the reverse role in that movie [the younger man in a gay relationship rather than the older one, as in Queer]. But everybody gets old! Luca wanted to adapt Queer for many years. The rights finally came free not that long ago, and he approached me. I’d have swept the floor for the guy because I think all his movies are exceptional and individual.

Colman, how did you wind up working on a film with a cast comprising mostly nonprofessional actors, 85 percent of whom had been incarcerated at one time at Sing Sing prison and had been through the program that you guys depict in the film?

COLMAN DOMINGO My director, Greg Kwedar, and his co-writer, Clint Bentley, have been volunteer teachers at Sing Sing for years. They kept saying, “If we can capture what we’ve learned from this Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, wouldn’t it be great to do a film about that?” Greg said he put the idea in his drawer and then pulled it out a couple of years later and wrote a quick treatment, and at the end, luckily enough, he wrote down, “Colman Domingo.”

Paul, nearly a quarter century after Ridley Scott made Gladiator …

CRAIG You weren’t even born, were you?

PAUL MESCAL I was 4. (Laughs.)

… Ridley begins planning to move forward with a sequel and sees you in Normal People?

MESCAL My dad showed me Gladiator when I was 13 — I was obsessed with the battle sequences. But Aftersun and things like that [indie movies], that’s my bread and butter in terms of what I’m drawn to as an actor. But if I was going to make a big film? And Sir Ridley Scott comes asking? Ridley organized a Zoom, which lasted half an hour — he spoke with me for 10 minutes about the arc of the story, 10 minutes about his dog and 10 minutes about Gaelic football, and then it was offered to me. (Laughs.) I was like, “I could go and look at the first film and see what Russell did so excellently.” But that felt like a mistake because that’s not my lane. If Ridley’s entry point to me was something like Normal People and Aftersun and All of Us Strangers, I was keen to, where possible, draw a performance style from those films and try to bring it to something bigger.

Peter, you were working on the television series Presumed Innocent when you first heard about September 5. The director, Tim Fehlbaum, had made two prior, lower-profile films. What convinced you to ask for time off from Presumed Innocent to go and do this, 21 years after acting in Shattered Glass, another great film about journalism?

PETER SARSGAARD Believe it or not, it started at a concert. Sean Penn, who was in the first movie I ever did, Dead Man Walking, was there, and we hung out for most of the evening. At the end he said, “There’s something coming your way, by the way.” I went, “Oh, great.” He produced this movie. So when I met Tim, to be fair, I was already like, “Sean likes this guy.” Then Tim started talking about all this real footage, and I saw Jim McKay, this sports announcer who delivered the terrible news [on Sept. 5, 1972] without making it about himself, and I thought, “That type of person and sincerity has really been lost.” I started thinking it was a really interesting idea to go back to the first time that a live camera ever covered a crisis situation. Then Tim showed me pictures of all the real [original newsroom] equipment that he had, and a lot of the shit worked — it wasn’t greenscreen on the monitors behind us; we were watching actual images from the Olympics and cutting to the real Jim McKay. I’d say the lead is almost Jim McKay. We’re supporting him.

Adrien, your director, Brady Corbet, is 36. His two previous features are nothing on the scale of this one, even if the budget on this one was less than $10 million. What made you want to be a part of it, 22 years after playing another man traumatized by his experience during World War II in The Pianist?

ADRIEN BRODY There’s a real richness to the storytelling, and it speaks to many things historically that are quite relevant today but also very personal to me. My mother is a Hungarian-born photographer and artist, Sylvia Plachy, and has been a beacon for me in all my artistic pursuits. And her hardships and her parents’ — my grandparents’ — hardships of fleeing Budapest in 1956 during the revolution, losing their home and leaving everything behind and escaping under a bed of corn on the back of a truck and eventually immigrating to the United States? They’re obviously not related to my character and his personal struggles, but I felt very fortunate to be able to represent that immigrant experience. We’re all on a quest to find something of meaning that leaves behind something of meaning, and that’s also the quest of my character, as an architect. Brady is also very much like László. I often just look at my directors and try to channel them. That’s my trick. (Laughs.)

Sebastian, Donald Trump is probably the most famous — and most imitated — person in the world, so I imagine it might have been a little intimidating to be asked to join the long line of people who have portrayed him.

SEBASTIAN STAN So much of what Adrien just said resonated for me in terms of wanting to be part of something that stands the test of time. I had a personal thing with the American dream because I came to this country from Romania when I was 12, and my father helped people escape illegally. I had heard all about the American dream and have been trying to this day to figure out what this dream is and what it gives us and what it takes away. That overrode any sort of fear about doing it because it was him. I played this little game with myself where I crossed out the names [of the characters], and there was still a Michael Corleone sort of story. And here was this filmmaker [Ali Abbasi] who was European, who’d fled Iran, who’s fearless and whose last film was all about his previous country, coming into this with a fresh perspective, not wanting to play for any team, just removing all judgment. I thought, “Can we just try to find out who the hell this person [Trump] is? What’s beneath this character?” And when you peel back the layers, you get to the core of a powerless child who has been enacting a sort of vendetta of revenge that we’ve all been subjected to, to no end. I think that we as artists, as actors, have to keep reflecting the times that we’re in as best as we can, no matter how ugly they are.

For Sebastian, there were two big-swing projects this year, the other being A Different Man.

BRODY Double feature. That’s so impressive.

STAN It’ll never happen again. It was thanks to the strike.

Sebastian, your character in that film has neurofibromatosis, a form of facial disfigurement, and you were only willing to play him because your director and co-star wanted you to, right?

STAN With this one, I definitely feel like I took a little bit of what Adrien said about playing your director because [director Aaron Schimberg] also wrote it, and it’s so much about his experience of being a disfigured man. Sometimes I was like, “I’ll just copy.” But he’s been trying to figure out how he can get us to see a movie that represents this disability, and he was finding it very difficult. In his previous film, he hired Adam [Pearson, an actor who has neurofibromatosis] to be in it, and he got backlash because people were saying he was exploiting Adam, so the movie didn’t get seen. But if he was casting an able-bodied actor to play a disabled person, then he’s not really representing, and nothing happens. So he found a way with this movie of doing both.

These performances were ballsy. At what point did you feel most in danger of failing?

CRAIG Every day I was thinking, “This is all failing. Where is this going?” From the moment I got there in the morning until the moment I’d leave at the end of the day, it was like, “What the fuck?”

DOMINGO I was working with men who had the lived experience of being incarcerated, and every day I was like, “I don’t want to be a fraud.”

SARSGAARD If you play a real person — Nixon or somebody like that — it requires a different level of acting. When you play a Roone Arledge, nobody cares [because he’s not instantly recognizable]. You can just take whatever you want from the person. (To Stan) To succeed at what you did [playing Trump] is a whole other level.

STAN I was having panic attacks every night. There was not enough time to gain weight, and the prosthetics test failed badly, so I was fucked. And not only that, but the director, two weeks out, goes, “Originally, I was going to cast a woman to play Trump.”

BRODY That’s reassuring.

STAN “Why are you fucking telling me this two weeks before?! I’m going to die.”

Most of you have played recognizable people at some point. What makes the difference between an impersonation and a performance?

DOMINGO You’ve got to find their soul. You’ve got to go deeper. When I played Bayard Rustin [in 2023’s Rustin], I had teeth knocked out and an accent and a wig, but I was like, “I can’t let that be the performance.” You’re required to find their soul.

MESCAL Sometimes those things help though, right?

DOMINGO Yeah. The physical helps.

BRODY You have a responsibility to represent the physicality and something that’s familiar.

STAN I always think of that Apollo 13 scene when they dump all the stuff on the table and they take a triangle and a circle and they’re like, “You’ve got to take this and make it fit into that.” With real people, you have targets — you know where you’re aiming.

SARSGAARD Well, you guys [Stan and Jeremy Strong, who played Roy Cohn in The Apprentice] anchored each other. You fed back to the other person, “This is who we are.”

DOMINGO (To Stan) When I watched what you did, I thought, “Oh, he’s taken away any judgment [of Trump].” I thought that was exceptional because everyone has an opinion about him, but you’re like, “No, I’m going to do the soul work.”

STAN Thank you. I always think of the great [acting coach] Larry Moss. The Intent to Live was a big book for me, about “everyone has a big emotional need.” Is it to be loved? Is it to be heard? Is it for approval? I mean, everything for Trump, from my perspective, is about power. It’s, “I want to be the most powerful person in the world.”

You’ve all worked in the theater — in fact, Paul, you’re soon doing A Streetcar Named Desire off-Broadway. Is there something about being onstage that makes you a better screen actor?

MESCAL Yeah, I think so. Somebody said to me that film is a director’s medium — they have the canvas and you’re the paint — but stage is very much a writer’s and an actor’s medium. Once previews are over, that’s your stage, that’s where you go and play. More broadly, something like Streetcar obviously has a very famous performance history, as does something like Gladiator II. Once I’d been cast in Streetcar, I was like, “I can never go back and look at the film until the dust has settled on it all.” And being onstage, you’re acting in a wide shot the whole time — there’s no hiding, there’s no going again. On a Ridley set, a lot of it feels theatrical because it’s not wide shot then tight coverage then medium shot; it’s all happening in one go.

He has a zillion cameras going at once?

MESCAL It depends. In the scenes in the cell, he would get as many cameras in there as possible — maybe he’d get to five, trying to cram a sixth in the door. Whereas when you’re shooting the battle scenes, it’s 12.

SARSGAARD Twelve?! (Laughs.)

MESCAL Twelve cameras, easy. Camera operators dressed up in costume like Roman soldiers.

DOMINGO Really?! That’s fantastic. (Laughs.)

MESCAL So you save time with the amount of takes that you’re going to do because the coverage is there. But you also gain a sense of freedom because continuity goes out the window.

Daniel, you’ve often returned to the stage in New York. For some of the more theatrical characters that you’ve played onscreen, like Benoit Blanc, I imagine that’s helpful?

CRAIG The first movie job I ever did, I went on the set and the director kept saying to me [complimenting him], “God, you’re so still!” I was like [to myself], “Because I’m terrified!” On the stage, because I’d been doing that for so long, there was just the freedom to be. I didn’t go into film knowing how to do that. That I had to learn — and I’m still learning to this day how to be as free on film as I can be on the stage.

A lot of actors are surely thinking about you all, “They are exactly where I want to be.” But that hasn’t always been the case. Colman, your story of the past 10 years is so inspiring. You were almost ready to hang it up, right?

DOMINGO Not almost. Full-out.

You acted in the musical The Scottsboro Boys on Broadway and got a Tony nomination, then you acted in it again on the West End and got an Olivier nomination, and then you came back to the U.S. and …

DOMINGO I was a journeyman actor for years. Sometimes in the same night, I’d bow and then get a cab across town and take my bartending shift — I couldn’t give it up because I was getting $400 a week. That had been going on for many years — I’ve been working for about 34 years now. I came back to New York and was really disheartened because I was still going in for under-fives [auditioning for parts of less than five minutes of screen time], and I just thought, “My talent is not being used. And I don’t want to be bitter about it.” Because you start to feel a little bitterness. After feeling disrespected in an audition, I’d take the sides and put them in the trash before I walked out. Then there was a series of auditions and no’s — like eight no’s in one week — and one just broke me. It seemed perfect for me. The casting director and everyone said it was perfect. I went and met with the director and the producers. And then there was the most insane reason why I didn’t get it. [Domingo has previously said that the audition was for Boardwalk Empire and he was told that the part required a Black actor with lighter skin than his.] I pretty much collapsed in the gym [upon being told that]. I was crying and thought, “This is going to kill me. I have to leave before it kills me.” And right when I said, “That’s enough,” a friend said, “Hey, my managers have been wanting to meet with you.” I said, “No, I’m good. I just dropped my manager, and I’m about to drop my agent and do something else.” He said, “Just meet with them.” I did. Honestly, I felt like it was the worst meeting I’d ever had because I went in there with my arms folded and said, “I know myself. I don’t fit in certain boxes. I know what you see is different, but I do all these different things. But I don’t think that there’s a place for me in this business.” They said, “Give us six months and we’ll make some changes together.” My first two auditions after that were for a Baz Luhrmann series and for Fear the Walking Dead on AMC. I thought, “Fear the Walking Dead? I don’t do things like that.” But then they sent me this monologue that felt like I was doing Richard III, and I thought, “This is beautiful.” Television was starting to change, and I felt like there was a place for me. I booked both jobs — which was odd to me because I hadn’t been booking anything, and those were off of self-tapes — and that gave me a new footing in the industry. I want to be useful in this practice of being an artist. I think what we do at our best is we’re in service. This is a service job. And I want to be in service to this work. (Chokes up with emotion.) I’m glad I stuck around.

We’re sitting here talking during the weird circus that is known as awards season. Some of you have been through this before. Adrien, 22 years ago you went through it with The Pianist, and at 29 you became — and to this day remain — the youngest person ever to win the best actor Oscar. What do you know now that you wish you knew then?

BRODY Oh, that’s a lovely question. No one’s ever asked that. I don’t “wish I knew” because you can’t. You only learn things through experience.

CRAIG You wouldn’t listen. My younger self just wouldn’t listen. He’d be like, “Whatever. Blah, blah, blah.”

BRODY It’s absolutely true. You do not listen until you fail or until it really hurts. For a shift to occur, there has to be enlightenment. Enlightenment comes oftentimes through suffering or hardships. I’ve had a very blessed life and career, but it’s never been easy. The thing to know is there are many chapters. To be at this table, both physically and metaphorically, is a triumph, honestly. And there are wonderful, positive career bonuses from accolades. But I think at the end of the day, everybody at this table will tell you that it’s the work — the experience of getting it and making it and enduring it and feeling great about the accomplishment of leaving it — that is the beauty, the joy. I’d been acting professionally for 17 years before that [Oscar]. To a lot of people, I was an overnight success, but I’d been kicking around, paying dues. And it was a remarkable thing, but it was kind of jarring.

MESCAL This is a mad experience for me, just to clarify. I’m 28 years of age.

CRAIG Yeah. Why are you here? (Laughs.)

MESCAL When I was in drama school, I became hyperfixated on watching actors that I really admired talk about the work that they do. So I’m sitting here and I’m like, “What the fuck is going on?” For me, anyway, there’s this latent imposter syndrome.

CRAIG Oh, it doesn’t go away. I walk on the set thinking someone’s going to go, “Bluff.” It’s always there, that self-doubt. But I think as soon as you think you can do it, you can’t.

Peter, you once said that after playing a rapist and murderer in Boys Don’t Cry, you were disturbed to find that out in the real world, you got more female attention than ever before.

SARSGAARD Why did I say that? Oh my God. Yeah, that was true.

That’s obviously an unexpected response to your work. What have you all noticed about the way people interact with you in the aftermath of seeing these performances?

MESCAL People think I’m a tough guy. We had a premiere in Dublin, and we were walking past the pub, and there were these Irish lads, and for the first time ever, they were like, “Go on, the Glad [as in Gladiator]! Just walk!”

BRODY No one has seen this movie yet. But it’s funny, people will say, “My mom really likes you.”

DOMINGO Oh my God. Isn’t that the wildest thing? “So you don’t, right?”

MESCAL “My girlfriend thinks you’re great.” (Laughs.)

STAN In New York, I went with Ali into Trump Tower. At the time, he still thought we could shoot in Trump Tower — I was like, “You’re out of your mind” — and I remember somebody going, “Is that the Marvel guy?” And I was like, “I’m out.” But weirdly, I still get Fresh [callouts] — it’s women with the cannibal thing, I just don’t understand it.

DOMINGO From playing Mister in The Color Purple, I get a lot of older Black women in airports going [flirtingly], “Oooh, Mister” — but it’s weird because Mister is not a lovely person, he’s an abuser. I’m like, “Wait, you know he was a villain?” “It’s all good. Let me get a picture.”

What would you be doing today if you had not become an actor?

SARSGAARD I really like being around young people, and I’ve had some experiences with teaching, so I can imagine that route.

STAN Yeah, maybe something with young people because that’s always going to humble you.

CRAIG Serving cocktails on the QE2.

DOMINGO I wanted to be a chef. I still cook as an amateur — I love food.

MESCAL Something that would enable me to play Gaelic football.

BRODY I used to paint and draw before I was acting, and I loved that. I rediscovered it later when I put down acting for some time.

Which living actor with whom you’ve not worked before would you most like to work with?

SARSGAARD It’s going to sound schmaltzy, but I’ve never acted with my wife [Maggie Gyllenhaal] in a movie. We did a film together — when we first met, I got her a part in this movie that I was doing, and she did one scene where we made love. But then the whole film was actually out of focus — we shot it for nine weeks — and the whole film was gone.

MESCAL No way.

DOMINGO What?!

BRODY Oh my God, that’s horrible.

MESCAL Michelle Williams.

BRODY Robert De Niro.

STAN Cate Blanchett.

CRAIG All you guys.

DOMINGO Adrien Brody.

BRODY Brother, that can happen!

This story appeared in the Dec. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.