On “Succession,” Dagmara Dominczyk plays a poker-faced PR exec who is “super corporate and doesn’t let an ounce of emotion out,” she said. “Blazered, buttoned up and there to do a job.” Whereas in the Netflix film “The Lost Daughter,” from writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dominczyk embodies the complete opposite as a pushy mother-to-be: “She’s the kind of person who’s like, ‘Make yourself comfortable — and let me show you just how comfortable you should be and where you should sit and what you should eat.’ She’s larger than life and wants to put herself into everybody’s business and it was enticing to play someone like that.”
Dominczyk, who is married to fellow actor Patrick Wilson, will also star in “We Own This City,” about corruption in the Baltimore police department, out later this year on HBO from the creators of “The Wire.”
Amid her many career high points, when asked about a worst moment in her career, she recalled a memory that was “embarrassing but also really frightening. And it happened on stage.”
My worst moment …
“In 2010 I was doing this play at the Rattlestick Theatre (in New York) that Heidi Schreck wrote called ‘There Are No More Big Secrets.’ I played this Russian journalist who is kind of a kook. She’s very domineering and believes in astral projections and is kind of sensuous but really dark and kind of Chekovian. She and her husband go upstate to this house to stay with another couple and they get drunk and things get brought to light and this character I play kind of goes crazy.
“We had been running for a while and gotten good reviews. I was doing really good work and I loved the cast.
“But there was one evening — and I don’t know what triggered it — but I had a full blown panic attack on stage in the middle of a scene, to the point where I felt like I was speaking in tongues. It’s a scene where they’re all sitting together at the table, they’re downing shots of vodka brought over from Russia, and I have this monologue about there being a witch in her family and she talks about believing in ghosts and the spiritual world and she’s a real fast talker, she dominates this evening with her tales. She’s very linguistic and loves to tell stories.
“And that night, I don’t know what happened but I felt myself getting faint. I saw little black dots in front of my eyes and my heart started pounding. I have a history of panic attacks so I knew what was happening, and all the words left me, I don’t know what I was saying or what I was doing. I knew I was fumbling and stumbling, but I don’t remember what I said. I was looking at my cast members and they were looking back at me with fear in their eyes, like ‘What the (expletive) is going on with Dag right now?,’ because they knew something was happening. My body was shaking. It was one of the most frightening things ever.
“I don’t remember anything except that I was almost suspended over myself looking down and going: Oh my God, I’m going to faint. My hands were shaking and I was supposed to be playing half-drunk in the scene because they’re just downing shot after shot, so there was a part of me that was thinking: Maybe this is OK and the audience will just think this crazy Russian lady is having a moment.
“I knew I had an exit after this monologue, she goes off to the bathroom. And Adam Rothenberg, who played my husband, after a while he followed me backstage and he grabbed my hands and he was like, ‘You’re going to be OK. I’m going to sit with you here. Just breathe.’ He was so kind and loving.
“I don’t know if the same thing would happen on (TV or film) set and an actor had a panic attack and they had to stop rolling. I would feel like there’s an element of: Uh-oh, time’s wasting, we have to make the day. But when you’re in a play, there’s just a different kind of bond between the actors. There just is. You’re running a marathon together, you’re not sprinting.
“Anyway, Adam sat with me and had me do those deep breathing exercises and it passed. I don’t know if he had experience with what to do during panic attacks, but he knew exactly what to do to center me. He met my panic with a very grounded energy. And I was able to do the rest of the play.
“Heidi, the playwright, was in the audience that night, and I remember afterward she was like, ‘What happened to you, are you OK?’ That experience just frightened me beyond. And I was so nervous to go on the next night and the night after that because the one thing about panic attacks is that your body remembers where it happened.
“I first started getting panic attacks when I was in ‘The Violet Hour’ on Broadway with Robert Sean Leonard (in 2003) and my dad was in the hospital. For about two weeks I would be visiting him between the matinee and the evening performance and the stress of that caused me to start having these little panic attacks right before the curtain would go up. And my fellow cast members would say, ‘Breathe. Take a bite of a banana. You’re going to be fine.’ And it went away and never happened again — until that night at Rattlestick on stage while the show was happening. It was really, really frightening and I’ll never forget it.”
What does she think caused the panic attack this time?
“My husband and I were just about to move from Brooklyn to Montclair, New Jersey. It was winter and it was snowy and I was having so many feelings about moving into a house in the suburbs, which was completely foreign to me, so maybe I was having some feelings about the fact that I was changing my life and moving away from everything that was familiar, I don’t know. I didn’t start the play that night thinking I was emotional about packing up and moving. I was. But I can’t be sure those feelings triggered that panic attack during that performance.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it before. You have nightmares where you forget your lines, but this was actually happening — and not only did I forget my lines, I couldn’t feel my body. The lights were so bright. It was an out-of-body experience. It felt like it went on forever.
“This is the closest that I’ve come to an experience on stage where I felt unsafe. I felt like the curtain would have to come down, or something horrible like that.”
Has this ever happened on a film or TV set?
“No, never! Ever, ever. It’s so odd to me and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because once you’re on the stage, you’re kind of in it and there’s no out.
“It kind of traumatized me there for a while, because I was so nervous that it would keep happening. You’re already kind of exposing yourself as a human on stage and that’s tantalizing and why we do it, right? You’re on display but you’re hoping to connect with people, which is exciting and thrilling and you get an immediate response from the audience, whether it’s a gasp or a sigh or a laugh, and no matter how deep you are in the scene, you register that.
“So me literally coming undone and knowing that I probably wasn’t fooling at least half of the audience, that was really scary not just as a performer that night, but as an actor in general. Like, you’re here to do a job and you’re not doing it — and people are going to talk about it. That’s the fear: That I have failed.
“And because the playwright was there that night, I felt like: Oh my God, am I totally unprofessional? Will people think I’m not cut out to do plays? For a second your confidence is shaken.
“But on the flip side, when you’re doing something together live every night — whether you get along with your fellow actors or not — when you’re on that stage together, you’re really on that stage together. There’s a bond that comes after weeks of rehearsals where you get to know each other. It’s not transient, like when you come on set and do your stuff and then go home. I make really great bonds with people on set, but it stays on set. But in a play, there’s such a powerful bond.
“So the fact that this incredibly scary, awkward, weird thing happened to me on stage, none of my fellow actors were angry with me, all I had was their support. They were so loving and ready to be there for me and catch me — literally I thought they were going to have to catch me because I thought I was going to fall off the chair and faint. And that is what I love most about theater. That camaraderie. It feels so old-timey in a way.”
The takeaway …
“I think in hindsight, I realized that nothing is guaranteed and I’m going to crack and come undone here and there. And as long as I’m honest about it, there will be people who support me through it, whether it’s in a play on stage or at home with my kids or my friends.
“I wish I had a really comforting takeaway like: Well, you dealt with that panic attack and you’ll never have to deal with it again! No. Sometimes you have to go through life carrying a burden or a fear and you just learn to have it fit inside you and navigate through it.”
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