TV Talk: McCandless native plays Rustin in Nat Geo’s ‘Genius: MLK/X’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

There’s occasionally weird serendipity in Hollywood casting when it comes to Pittsburgh ties.

Netflix’s “Rustin,” a bio-pic about gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin played by actor Colman Domingo, filmed in Pittsburgh.

Now McCandless native Griffin Matthews (“The Flight Attendant,” “She-Hulk”), a 2003 Carnegie Mellon University grad, plays Rustin in National Geographic Channel’s Atlanta-filmed “Genius: MLK/X” (9 -11 p.m. Thursday for four weeks beginning Feb. 1; streams next day on Disney+ and Hulu, first episode simulcasts at 9 p.m. Feb. 1 on ABC).

In a phone interview this month, Griffin said he’s friends with Domingo and the two went to lunch before Griffin auditioned for “Genius” but after Domingo shot “Rustin” in Pittsburgh.

“I was telling him, ‘I don’t think I can play Rustin. I’m just not him,’ and Colman was like, ‘You are him. You are ready. Cut off all your hair, go back into a neutral zone and go for it,’ ” Matthews recalled. “A couple weeks later, I got to text him the longest voice text, saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ He saw something in me I didn’t see in me, and I was just so grateful that he unknowingly passed the torch to me. That never happens.”

“Rustin” filmed on stages in Warrendale, minutes from where Matthews grew up, and, yes, Matthews saw “Rustin” after he filmed his “Genius” role.

“(Colman) and I talked about how difficult it was to portray Rustin because Rustin was such an enigma,” Matthews said. “I loved watching Colman’s portrayal of him because he was so hard to capture. Rustin had a weird accent, he had missing teeth, he had this crazy life he lived that was very bold for the time period.”

This season’s “Genius” showrunners, writing partners Damione Macedon and Raphael Jackson Jr. (“Power,” “Low Winter Sun”), said they’d been fans of Matthews’ acting for several years before casting him in “Genius.”

“Everything he touches is fantastic,” Macedon said. “So when his name came up for playing our Rustin, we needed somebody who exemplified just how dynamic and iconic that particular man was. … Colman Domingo just crushed it (in the Netflix film). But a lot of people don’t know Rustin, and they don’t know how much of an icon he is. We needed somebody who could jump off the screen, and that’s exactly what Griffin was for us.”

Jackson Jr. added, “A lot of what you find when you’re on set is that there’s time between when you shoot. And part of the energy that you (bring) adds a lot to what you see on camera. And for Griffin, not only was he ready, prepared, on point within the task at hand, he also was able to extend that to the set as well.”

This iteration of “Genius” is the first to tackle the biographies of two people at once, juxtaposing the approaches to gaining civil rights equality championed by Martin Luther King Jr. (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Malcolm X (Aaron Pierre) as well as the roles in the movement played by their wives, Coretta Scott King (Weruche Opia) and Betty Shabazz (Jayme Lawson).

Playing Rustin marked Matthews’ first on-screen portrayal of a real person, not a fictional character, which changed his preparation for the role.

“When I am playing a character made up in the mind of a writer, I get to infuse myself and I get so much say in how the character is built,” Matthews said. “But with Rustin, I honestly was terrified because I wanted to do him justice because there is footage of him (that the performance could be compared to) and because the script of ‘Genius’ was so dense with material that I had to go back to my Carnegie Mellon days of highlighting and circling. I locked my door for a week and watched videos and documentaries and listened to Rustin’s speeches. I just wanted to see if I could drum up the essence of who he was. Part of the thing I tried to land on was capturing his joy even inside all the heartbreak and defeat and the sidelining that happened to him.”

In addition to Matthews, other notable actors in “Genius” supporting roles include the late Ron Cephas Jones (“This is Us”) as Nation of Islam leader Elijah Mohammed, Lennie James (“The Walking Dead”) as King’s father, LisaGay Hamilton (“The Practice”) as King’s mother, John C. McGinley (“Scrubs”) and President Johnson and Donal Logue (“Terriers”) as Strom Thurmond.

The showrunners said Nat Geo executives initially intended this “Genius” to focus solely on King but executive producers Reggie Rock Bythewood and Gina-Prince Bythewood told network execs, “You can’t tell the story of Martin without Malcolm,” and suggested cross-cutting between the two men’s biographies as well as depicting where they intersected.

Before “breaking” the story — the process of organizing a season and deciding what plot turns belong in each episode — the showrunners relied on a think tank of historians to provide them with the accurate history for them to hang the docudrama on.

“The challenge always is to take that information and see how you can make it entertaining and thought-provoking,” Jackson Jr. said.

“Beyond the heroes that are on T-shirts, they were both men of a certain era,” Macedon added. “That was our way in. We treated them like people rather than geniuses. … We were more interested in who they were and how they became who they were than what they did. By starting there, we found a multitude of similarities at the surface level.”

Both men were born around the same time, and they both dealt with the same racial strife in the same era. Both had fathers who were big influences on their lives. They both became husbands and fathers around the same time. They even both had a sweet tooth for ice cream.

“What we found was the only major difference that they had was their ideology,” Macedon said. “They wanted the exact same thing. They wanted pride and respect for African Americans in that time to be everlasting. They just obviously saw it in two different ways. But their heart was always in the right place.”