Succession actress on Season 4, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter on Netflix and husband Patrick Wilson

The last few months of 2021 have been a particularly fruitful time for Dagmara Dominczyk. The 45-year-old accomplished thespian is giving audiences one heck of a one-two punch between reprising her role as Karolina Novotney in the HBO series Succession and closing out the year by appearing in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s critically acclaimed feature directorial debut The Lost Daughter, which is streaming on Netflix. Dominczyk is one of those actors you’ve almost certainly seen before in movies and on television but maybe need a little help placing. Her Succession character may be low key but is usually one of the few functioning adults in any room she is in that also includes members of the emotionally stunted Roy family. As one of Waystar Royco’s main public-relations specialists, Karolina’s job is to sugarcoat all the awful misdeeds the family commits while trying not to lose her mind over all the crazy positions she’s put in. Though she didn’t have much to do in the show’s third season, Dominczyk says the plan is to bring her back for Season 4. She and Succession creator Jesse Armstrong have sketched out Karolina’s backstory, and she would love for viewers to eventually learn more about what makes her tick. Ming-Na Wen up for more Star Wars fun with The Book of Boba Fett “I love being part of that group with all those incredibly smart, passionate and brave creators and actors,” Dominczyk says. “We’re all playing in that sandbox, but because of my role I sit in the corner of the sandbox and tell people to put their shovels back. I want to play too!” Between Succession and her role in the upcoming miniseries We Own This City, “I owe HBO my midlife career boost,” Dominczyk says. Born to a Polish-American family that had settled in New York, Dominczyk left home for Pittsburgh in 1994 to study at Carnegie Mellon University, where she would meet her future husband, actor Patrick Wilson. I thought, what an opportunity to be someone who owns space and takes space from others and who’s bold and big Dominczyk on her role in The Lost Daughter Wilson was a senior when Dominczyk was a freshman and still trying to keep a long-distance relationship alive with her high-school boyfriend. The two reconnected a decade later at a New York mixer for current and former CMU students, and Dominczyk says some of the professors there later told her that basically “we saw you fall in love that night”. They’ve been married for more than 15 years now, and Dominczyk says one of her two sons is a budding actor who already plans on auditioning for CMU when he’s older. “It was really nice that we didn’t meet on some set and had similar memories,” she says of their CMU connection. “It felt new and exciting to be with each other, but familiar because we had that experience in common, which I think is really cool.” Before signing on to The Lost Daughter, Dominczyk had been running into Gyllenhaal and her husband Peter Sarsgaard for years. She had worked with Sarsgaard on the 2004 film Kinsey and Gyllenhaal on an episode of the HBO series The Deuce. When Gyllenhaal was adapting Elena Ferrante’s 2008 novel The Lost Daughter into a feature film script, she called Dominczyk and said that she saw her as Callie, a loud and naturally distrustful character. Gyllenhaal loved the book and was very into the idea of working on a film that also starred Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley, but Dominczyk hesitated to leave her children to go film in Greece during a pandemic while Wilson was filming a movie of his own in Montreal, in Canada. Her mum and sister stepped up to watch the kids, and off Dominczyk went to make a movie where she played a character who was a far cry from the demure Karolina. “Because of these amazing women in my life, I said yes,” Dominczyk says. “And it was the best thing I could’ve done, for my career and me personally … I was coming off of two years wearing a blazer and pantyhose. I thought, what an opportunity to be someone who owns space and takes space from others and who’s bold and big. It was so much fun!” Is Paris Hilton’s Paris World the hottest place to be in the metaverse right now? As someone who “can be blunt in a loving way”, it wasn’t too hard for Dominczyk to tap into that side of her to play the “bold and brash” Callie. To her, the women in The Lost Daughter aren’t archetypes, but rather feel like real people “who will annoy you and confound you and you’ll cry for them all in the same breath”. The Lost Daughter was also filmed during the pandemic, but a gorgeous, isolated Greek island wasn’t exactly the worst place to be shooting a movie. “Sometimes you make a movie and the experience of making it is wonderful but the end result is not as great as you hoped,” Dominczyk says. “Sometimes the experience of making it is awful and stressful but the end result is amazing. Once in a while, the experience of making it and the final product are amazing. And that’s what The Lost Daughter was.” Dominczyk is excited that the film is already receiving so much awards-season attention, though that doesn’t matter to her as much as just finding more high-quality opportunities like this to continue doing what she loves. “At 45, I feel like I’m having a second wind here and that feels really, really nice,” she says. “Who knows when it will be over. I’m just going to enjoy it today.”