Dominique Fishback was ready to fight for the lead role in Swarm
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Dominique Fishback wasn't offered the lead role in Swarm — but she wanted it, so she asked for it. The rest is TV history.
"They wanted me for Marissa originally," Fishback recalls of her first meeting with series co-creators Donald Glover and Janine Nabors, on the latest episode of EW's The Awardist podcast. "I was looking for an opportunity as an actor to really show just how much I can do and the versatility that I always felt that I had inside. ... So I told my team after, 'Listen, you can tell him thank you. I'm honored, but I don't wanna play Marissa. I wanna play Dre.' And my team was like, 'Okay, you might have to fight for Dre, you might have to audition.' I was like, if that's the case, so be it."
She didn't have to fight very hard. When she got on the phone with Glover, he had a simple question: "Tell me why?"
"I said, 'I just don't wanna catch up to my own self as an actor,'" Fishback explains. Glover admitted he and Nabors thought of her for Marissa (eventually played by Chloe Bailey) because the actress felt "familiar," like "our sisters, our friends," Fishback recalls of their conversation. "'But if that's the role you want, that's the role you get.' And I was almost like, 'What? Wait...' I was on the phone thinking like, did this really happen or was he hypothetically speaking? But no, it was mine just from asking for it. And then I had to think, 'Oh, I don't know what she's doing in the rest of this show. And I got nervous.'"
Prime Video Dominique Fishback in 'Swarm'
Nervous for good reason. Dre is certainly not a girl-next-door type; a superfan of music superstar Ni'Jah — Beyoncé, basically — Dre tracks down and kills several people across various states who speak negatively on social media about Ni'Jah after she drops a surprise album. Even when Rashida (Kiersey Clemons), Dre's girlfriend, speaks negatively of the singer, Dre — who's now presenting masculine as Tony — does the unthinkable.
"I think she really loved Rashida. I think Rashida loved her as well. And so it almost felt hopeful, like, maybe she got over the demons that she had and then...she didn't," Fishback says. "That was something I had to come to terms with before I did it. What does it mean to wanna do light work in your life and with your art, [but then] play a character that is more in the darkness? I talked to a lot of my friends, but it really came down to the fact that, you have to go to darkness to shed light on the things that we don't really address a lot of the times."
Prime Video Dominique Fishback in 'Swarm'
While the Prime Video series leaves some elements to interpretation, there's one thing she never questioned. Yes, Fishback has seen the theories that Dre actually killed her foster sister and bestie Marissa — but she can't get on board with that chatter.
"That never crossed my mind, not when I read the script, not when I first watched it," she says. "There's these think pieces, and this one tweet that I saw, a girl went in about how in film and film history, the lights mean things. And you could see Dre is washed with a yellow light in this moment and all this stuff. I was there and I'm not trying to discredit anybody, but I swear we weren't — it wasn't thinking that. ... Unless they made a decision for Dre — like the lights made a decision for Dre that I wasn't aware of, and that wasn't brought to my attention, to say that she killed Marissa... the theory was cool. I could end up believing that if I wasn't there. Dre loves Mariss so much, she would never do that. I don't see that happening."
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