Dominique Fishback was flying from her home in New York City to Los Angeles for a chemistry test with Jamie Foxx when she lost her wallet. Having appeared in The Hate U Give and HBO’s The Deuce, the 29-year-old was up for perhaps her largest part yet — a leading role in Netflix’s summer blockbuster Project Power — and wasn’t going to let the mishap distract her from this opportunity. Anyway, she had more pressing concerns.
“‘Am I going to be able to compose myself when I see Jamie Foxx? Am I going to show him upfront that I’m a fan? How are we going to play this, Dom?’ That’s what I’m thinking to myself,” she tells 360aproko.
As fate would have it, Fishback’s car happened to arrive at the same time as Foxx’s. “And I said, ‘Mr. Jamie Foxx’ — I just yelled that — and he said, ‘Your energy is crazy’ and he gave me a hug. And I said, ‘Cool. Now I can settle myself and focus,'” Fishback recalls. The two recited a scene and Fishback performed a spoken word number — her character in the film is a rapper, but as she says, “Poetry is my thing” — and wowed her eventual co-star and Project Power’s directors, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.
“After, I said, ‘OK, this turned out to be really good, even though I lost my wallet,'” Fishback says. “Jamie was like, ‘You need cash? Because I got cash.’ He pulls out this wad of money, pulls out a hundred-dollar bill, gives it to me, one of the directors gives me 50 dollars, and Jamie said, ‘It’s not every day you leave an audition with $150.'”
Project Power revolves around a mysterious pill that temporarily grants powers — bulletproof skin, super strength, invisibility — to its user for five minutes of super heroics. Or crime, as tends to be the case on the streets of New Orleans, sending an ex-solider (Foxx), a cop (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and a teenage dealer (Fishback) on a collision course.
“Anybody out there who’s a fan of movies and a fan of acting and actors should watch Project Power, if for no other reason than to check out Dominique Fishback,” Gordon-Levitt tells 360aproko. “This is a brilliant young artist who’s got a long career ahead of her.”
Foxx, meanwhile, not only co-signs that praise but offers a clear vision of where that career will lead: “You are watching the emergence of an actress that one day will be standing up and saying, ‘I want to thank all of the members…’ I’m telling you,” he mimics a de rigeur Oscars speech. “I watched this girl on the set… and I always say this: None of these movies work if the chemistry between the people isn’t fluid. And then once it’s fluid, then everything else makes sense.”
As for Fishback’s missing wallet, the same day she closed her deal on Project Power, she got an email from the airline saying they had found it. “It was a complete full circle,” she grins. “When we wrapped the movie, I signed a $100 bill, I put it in a picture with me and Jamie and I gave it to him. And he said, ‘Don’t give me that, because I am gonna spend it!'”
