Inside Colman Domingo’s super sweet love story with husband Raúl

Hollywood star Colman Domingo has achieved incredible success in his professional life, which is set to be recognized at the 57th NAACP Image Awards, but his personal life is also awe-inspiring

Colman Domingo is set to celebrated for his incredible success at the 57th NAACP Image Awards.

The two-time Oscar nominee will receive the honorary President’s Award on February 28, which is given in recognition of special achievement and distinguished public service. The nod comes two years after Domingo had a double win at the Image Awards, taking home prizes for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture for Rustin and Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for The Color Purple.

Colman, 56, has a further two nominations this year, for Supporting Actor and Directing on the Netflix series The Four Seasons. Outside of his huge professional success, Colman has also found a wonderful mix in his personal life.

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He met his husband, Raul, over 20 years ago, with their love story going viral previously when he discussed how they found love. The pair – who married in 2014 – took a very “conscious” decision to keep their relationship private and are rarely pictured together.

Colman shared the story of how they met during a 2024 episode of The Graham Norton Show in the UK, while he was promoting Rustin, with the clip later going viral. In the footage, he recalls a chance meeting at a Walgreens nearly 20 years ago. He said, “I see this guy and we look at each other and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.'”

He described Raul as a man with “beautiful hair, lip piercing, beautiful.” He added, “He kept looking at me, and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’”

At the time, he was talking on the phone while the stranger, Raul, appeared to be in a tense conversation with someone else, making it hard for Colman to approach. He said, “I get off the phone, and they walk on down the street, but he keeps looking back. And I wave but he just keeps going.”

Three days later, fate intervened when Colman stumbled across a Craigslist “missed connection” post that perfectly described their brief encounter. “Saw you outside of Walgreens, Berkeley,” the ad read. Amazingly, Raul had posted it just two hours after they first crossed paths.

Colman shared, “I jumped up like, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s me.’ He described me with my faux-hawk (it was 2005)… we met up three days later, we had our first date…I said, ‘I think I love you and you’re about to change my life,’…and we’ve been together almost 19 years.”

Speaking to The Times, Colman admitted discussing how they met was not an off-the-cuff decision, but part of a concerted strategy to satisfy public demand without sacrificing information about the inner workings of their relationship. He explained: “That was very conscious. We knew that at some point people are going to be asking about my relationship, asking about my husband, and so we thought, ‘We’ll give you one simple story. But only one story.’

“And so we still maintain a level of privacy about our daily lives. He’s my best friend, we have a production company together, but we’re not a couple you’re going to see on a red carpet very often. We’re very conscious. We’re just not that couple.”

Colman also made a rare public tribute to Raul when he accepted his Emmy Award for guest actor in a drama series in 2022. He said, “A lot of kindness brought me to this stage, people who love me, people who lift me up. Thank you to those people. Thank you to my darling Raúl, this is for you.”

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