Everybody Is Buzzing About Dominique Fishback in ‘Swarm’

Swarm is a show about obsession on the internet that is itself now an internet obsession. It’s little wonder that the feeling is mutual: Created by Janine Nabers and Donald Glover, the buzzy show explores toxic fandom inside a doxxing hive community—referencing a familiar-feeling power couple’s world tour, elevator fights, and a mystery bite at a party—with roles for Paris Jackson and Billie Eilish, plus Malia Obama in the writers’ room. It follows Dre, a withdrawn, unpopular stan of a pop superstar called Ni’Jah. Ni’Jah is what she bonds over with her other great love, her sister Marissa (played by Chloë Bailey). But when Dre loses Marissa, broken by guilt and grief, she sets out to protect her favorite singer at any, increasingly bloody, cost.

“My team told me that Donald Glover had a show with me in mind,” explains its breakout star Dominique Fishback. “They don’t have the script. They don’t have a synopsis. He just said, watch this movie called The Piano Teacher.” Fishback was sucked in by Isabelle Huppert’s unsettling performance in the erotic 2001 film. “I was like, I don’t know if I’m that brave of an actor… But it really made me consider, what kind of actor do I want to be?” Just as she geared herself up to take a leap, the New Yorker was offered the role of Marissa, instead of Dre. “I’m used to playing characters that are ‘easier to love’; I want to stretch myself,” she told them. “I want to play Dre.” Her wish was their command. “[Glover] said, if that’s the role you want, that’s what you get.”

Still, imagining the public reaction to her performance as a violent killer gave her pause: “We all want to be loved,” she explains. In the end, the response was overwhelmingly positive because of, not in spite of, Dre’s proclivities. “There’s so much excitement from Black women and Black people—and people of all different races—because we’re just excited to see something different to shake us up.”

Speaking to Vogue the day after her 32nd birthday, Dominique says: “It’s wild, because I think of that quote, ‘as above, so below, as within, so without.’ It has been resonating with me for the last two and a half years. I was trying to figure out how to manifest love or appreciation and being seen. You really can’t do that, or get it at that greater scale, until you have it for yourself. I’m learning how to really love myself from the inside out, so to watch it manifest on my birthday with such a outpouring of love for Swarm was amazing.”