On August 28, 1963—almost exactly 60 years ago—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what might be the most impactful speech of the modern era at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Over 250,000 people gathered in Washington, DC, and heard Dr. King declare his dream for the nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—a moment that would forever immortalize Dr. King as a civil rights icon in the annals of American history. And none of it would have happened if not for the effort of one man who has been largely sidelined by those history books. That man was Bayard Rustin.

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In the biopic Rustin, which premieres in select theaters on November 3 and globally on Netflix November 17, Emmy winner Colman Domingo stars as the titular organizer, activist, and oft unsung hero who co-organized the March on Washington. Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground and written by Julian Breece and Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, Rustin follows the civil rights activist as he takes on the mammoth task of turning the 1963 March on Washington from dream into reality, all while contending with racism and homophobia as an out gay Black man in the 1960s.

“The cause, the responsibility, the task is so monumental,” says Tony-winning director George C. Wolfe. Speaking over Zoom—both Wolfe and Domingo conducted interviews for this first look before the SAG-AFTRA strike began—Wolfe imagines Rustin’s point of view as he organized a nonviolent protest for a quarter of a million people: “It is going to take all that I have and all that everyone that I know has, to pull this off.”

Wolfe pauses for a moment, in awe. “He did this in seven weeks.”

“History very frequently is like a Hollywood movie,” Wolfe tells me. “Whoever has the best agent gets the best billing. And who doesn’t gets tossed aside.” He’s quick to point out that Dr. King was “a phenomenon”—but so was Bayard Rustin, who was often forced to take a back seat in the civil rights movement. “We’re trained to see the star and not see anything else.”

And Rustin really was a star. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1912, Rustin’s Quaker roots inspired a lifelong commitment to activism that began well before the March on Washington. In researching the movie, Wolfe discovered that Rustin organized his multiracial basketball team to protest because he often couldn’t eat with them due to segregation. “He’s 15 or 16, going against a system that is unjust, engaging other people to join him in that process,” says Wolfe.

This innate passion for activism and talent for bringing people together took Rustin to India where he studied under leaders of the Gandhian method of nonviolent protest and passive resistance. He was a key adviser to Dr. King during the Montgomery bus boycotts, and a leader in organizing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and others, for the March on Washington. Eventually, Rustin served as an adviser to Dr. King. “We are thoroughly committed to the method of nonviolence in our struggle and we are convinced that Bayard’s expertness and commitment in this area will be of inestimable value,” wrote Dr. King to a colleague in a 1960 letter.

Despite being of “inestimable value” to Dr. King, Rustin has been relegated to no more than a footnote in many history books. Domingo admits that he wasn’t formally introduced to Rustin’s work until his college years. “He was this big thinker and an incredible organizer, and he was influential to not only Dr. King, but all these other young people as well,” Domingo says. “We owe a lot to Bayard Rustin. I think it’s part of my mission to make sure that hopefully, come this fall, there will never be that question again, who Bayard Rustin was.”

Domingo, who like Rustin is openly gay, has had his own experience being relegated to the background. His career began in earnest over a quarter century ago, initially breaking through with celebrated turns in musicals like Passing Strange and his Tony-nominated performance as “Mr. Bones” in The Scottsboro Boys. He’s received acclaim for screen performances in the likes of Zola and Euphoria, for which he won a guest-actor Emmy last year. And despite all of that, Rustin marks the first time that Domingo’s ever been number one on the call sheet.

“I’ve supported many of my colleagues in this industry and that’s been lovely being a supporting actor,” Domingo says. “I think I learned a lot, actually.… I’ve seen number ones on call sheets sort of isolate themselves from productions. They don’t know that they lead it.”

With Rustin, Domingo was ready to finally, as he put it, “be the soul of the production.… I knew it was my charge to empower every single person on that set,” he says. “I’m the center of this production, and the way you succeed or fall apart is because of me.”

“Right now, at 53 years old, I can look at the body of my work and I see it’s legacy work,” he adds. “It’s work that I know that I feel really good about and the imprint that I’m making in the arts.” Finally, stepping center stage in Rustin feels “like all the lights are on in my house, because everyone can see it now.”

Domingo and Wolfe’s relationship goes back to 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in which Wolfe directed Domingo alongside stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. But it wasn’t exactly an easy start.

“To be honest, I felt like sometimes we would bump on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, because we have very strong opinions about work or the details of things,” says Domingo. “The thing that I love about George, he always says, ‘Let’s go through and try everything. Let’s not get held up in one moment and believe that that’s the only way to do it. Let’s be free.’”

For Wolfe, the method is simple: “I have a saying that I use for my work, that I frequently throw in the faces of people that I work with,” he says. “‘The better it gets, the better it’s got to get.’ That’s the way it is.” In keeping with his theater roots, Wolfe begins every day on set with just the actors, clearing the set of any crew and talking through the scene with the cast. “It’s a chance for everybody to get grounded,” Wolfe says. It’s also a chance for Wolfe to develop a common vocabulary with the actors. “You have to figure out what language best serves the person who you are working with.”

“It’s you, an actor, and words,” he continues. “And then you have this thing called the camera, and that’s fun. But I just view that as another actor. The camera is another actor who’s in the room witnessing, sometimes intruding, sometimes observing, sometimes judging, sometimes pushing you closer to it than you want to be.”

While Bayard Rustin was a crucial voice in organizing the March on Washington, he was not alone. Rustin captures the internal struggle within the Black community to pull off the march, with civil rights leaders including Dr. King, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., John Lewis, and Ella Baker debating and sometimes clashing when trying to figure out how best to achieve their joint goal. To capture these collisions, Wolfe gathered a massively talented ensemble filled with A-list talent from stage and screen, including Michael Potts, CCH Pounder, Adrienne Warren, Glynn Turman, Audra McDonald, Jeffrey Wright, and Chris Rock.

“It’s a joy to work with ferociously committed artists,” Wolfe says. “It’s an incredibly impassioned group of people both on camera and off. You can’t ask for anything better than that.”

The cast also includes a number of up-and-coming young actors playing the people who did the often unglamorous work of organizing, like accounting, budgeting, and figuring out how to get people safely to and from the march. The day Domingo met those younger actors, he says, “It felt like it was Colman as Bayard, Bayard inside of Colman, going out to meet these young people. Maybe they’ve been admirers of mine from the theater or film, but they looked at me as if I was their North Star. And I hugged them as if they were the future. Each one.”

At 68, Wolfe can vaguely recall the March on Washington growing up as a child in Frankfort, Kentucky. “I was so young while all of this was happening. And so all these people were these adults, these gigantic human beings,” he says. Now, six decades after the fact, he is also struck by the relative youth of everyone involved.

“They were willing to do whatever they needed to do in order to see it transformed,” he says. “The power of that and the potency of that and the ferocious commitment. It’s astonishing to me. The more I worked on [Rustin], the more I dug into it, the more I was living with Bayard, I just became overwhelmed. Each day I would go, ‘I’m in awe. I’m in awe. I’m in awe. I’m in awe.’”

Rustin doesn’t shy away from the complicated aspects of its central subject’s homosexuality, how he faced prejudice sometimes even from within the very community he was fighting for.

“They aren’t statues,” says Wolfe, of Rustin and his fellow civil rights leaders. “They’re human beings who are vulnerable and who are incomplete and are still figuring it out.”

The fact that Rustin, a biopic about a queer Black man, is both directed by and stars Black men in the LGBTQ+ community is not lost on Domingo. “We’re not in the center of our own stories,” Domingo says, of queer Black men. “That’s the truth,” He believes that having Bayard Rustin live “in the body of an openly queer man,” was crucial to the biopic. “I can access things in a unique way and specifically for the character, of course, but there is a fearlessness to find that vulnerability and bring that part of myself to it as well,” he says. “I don’t have to reach so far outside of my experience, but I can pull from within. It’s being guided by someone who’s also an openly gay, openly queer Black male as well. I think that is very unique.”

Rustin would eventually become a fierce advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, shedding light on the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, until his death in 1987. Depicting Rustin as a complete person—with sexual desire—and not just a relic of the civil rights movement was essential to Wolfe.

“He claimed all of who he was,” Wolfe said. “He knew he needed to use all of who he was to overcome that which needed to be overcome. It’s both so crucial and so simple. You are who you are, and you need all of who you are to be the best version of you, period.”

For Domingo, stepping into his leading man era in Rustin’s shoes was bigger than himself or his own journey to get there. “I knew that being Bayard Rustin was not about me,” he says. “It was about so many of the marginalized people, the women of the march, all the men, the people who don’t get a name, who don’t get their shine. I knew I had to be in service to them.”

Service is a word that both Domingo and Wolfe are drawn to again and again when talking about Rustin, especially when describing the personal sacrifices he made for the civil rights movement. “His pride about his identity as a Black gay man was intact, and he used all of that in service of this larger idea,” said Wolfe. “It’s great to announce who you are. It’s even better to embody it. It’s even better to embody it with your entire being.”

This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall movie season coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.