Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin is passionate about the message conveyed by his onscreen debut, Sing Sing. “People that are locked up, people that may have committed crimes, people that may have made mistakes in their lives, they still have the ability to change, to grow, to be contributors to society,” he says. “But they may need some nurturing, they may need some tenderness and kindness.”
Maclin himself began to receive that support from the Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme (RTA), six years into a prison term in New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. The programme was set up in 1996 to allow incarcerated people to rehearse and perform plays, and when Maclin got involved, “I didn’t consider myself in prison anymore.” Thanks to the power of theatre, he explains, “I was free, and got to go to Greece, to France, to England, to Africa — I got to go to these places because we created them.”
This liberating effect is one of the themes explored by Greg Kwedar’s inspirational drama about the RTA, which premiered at Toronto in 2023, and was released by A24 in North America in July, and by Black Bear in the UK and Ireland. Colman Domingo stars as a real-life wrongfully imprisoned mainstay of the programme, John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield, but most of the cast members are actual RTA alumni. Still, the film is no documentary. Maclin chose to use his own name for his role, but it is clear from his first scene that he is a bona fide actor.
“What I don’t appreciate is when people say that I played myself,” he says on a Zoom call from his (parked) car in New York. “Because actually what that does is take away from the training that a lot of good people sacrificed their time to give me.”
The promoters of Sing Sing request that journalists not ask the actors about how and why they were incarcerated, but it is on record that Maclin, who grew up in the New York suburb of Mount Vernon, was convicted of robbery. The film’s own publicity material describes him as “one of the most feared men of Sing Sing”, and the character is initially presented as a violent and imposing jailyard drug dealer. While in prison, Maclin developed the same affinity for Shakespeare that his alter ego has in the film. “I don’t even know how I understand and hear what he’s saying,” he admits, “but once I started studying it and reading it, it just spoke to me.”
When life as a “yard bandit” got “boring”, Maclin enrolled in the RTA, and ended up featuring in ‘The Sing Sing Follies’, an Esquire magazine article on the programme written by John H Richardson. “That was a very proud moment for us,” Maclin says of its publication in 2005. “It was something tangible to send home to my mother, something that I could share with my loved ones on the other side of the wall to signify the growth and the change.” In 2016, Kwedar read Richardson’s article and realised it could be the basis for a film. He and his co-writer and fellow producer Clint Bentley then reached out to Brent Buell, a playwright who worked with the RTA, and who would end up being played in Sing Sing by Paul Raci.
Meanwhile, Maclin had been released. “Coming home from prison after doing so many plays and studying so much about theatre, quite naturally I thought I was going to be the next big thing,” he laughs. “But the task of paying the daily bills got in the way.” He now works for non-profit organisations that offer scholarships and mental-health seminars in deprived neighbourhoods. “I like to go into communities that have been impacted by behaviour that I used to participate in and somehow feel responsible for.”
Moral integrity
Nonetheless, a film role was on Maclin’s bucket list, so he was intrigued when Buell invited him and some fellow RTA graduates to a meeting with Kwedar and Bentley. “Others had approached us as well,” he recalls, “but when we sat down to meet with them, [the others] didn’t seem genuine, and we were afraid they wouldn’t represent us in a good light. But once we sat down with Greg and Clint, just based on conversations that had nothing to do with the movie — just seeing what kind of human being you are, and how you view life and where your moral compass is — it was a no-brainer. We had the sense that it was very important to them to keep the moral integrity and to keep it as authentic as they could.”
Committed to authenticity, the filmmakers employed Maclin to ensure the dialogue rang true, and he earned a joint ‘story by’ credit as a result. “There’s no place where you can go to learn and study prison jargon,” he points out, “unless you go to prison.” Kwedar and Bentley decided the emotional heart of Sing Sing should be the burgeoning friendship between Maclin and Whitfield, as played by Domingo.
“Colman’s a great guy,” says Maclin, “and we first met on Zoom — like this.” They also began rehearsals on Zoom because of the pandemic, and because Domingo was filming on the west coast. “One of the things that made me realise how committed he was, he would pull over on the side of the road just to run lines with me. And I’m saying in the back of my head somewhere, ‘Hold up, this is Colman Domingo, man. And he’s pulling over on the side of the road?’ So that commitment and dedication had to be matched.”
Maclin matched it when filming commenced in a decommissioned prison, not far from Sing Sing itself. “It was terrible having to go back inside prison, because we considered it hell,” he says. “We couldn’t wait to get out. So to voluntarily walk back inside a prison, even to put on the prison uniform that identifies you so well as an outcast of society, there was a lot of apprehension in doing that. However, the purpose of what we were doing it for was bigger than that minor discomfort I might suffer.”
Having signed to West Hollywood-based MGMT Entertainment for management representation in November 2022, when Sing Sing was being put together, Maclin is keen for his professional acting journey to continue — and a supporting actor Gotham nomination gives further encouragement. He would like to tell more “stories that heal people, that cause people to reflect on life and possibly see life differently”, but Maclin is hoping specifically to act in a Shakespeare production, a western and a period drama — because “I like the way we dressed in different periods”. Anything with a good costume, then? “Yeah, you know,” grins Maclin. “You got me already.”
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