By Julian Walker
Times Staff Writer

John Doman’s career is taking him places.
Like the time his agent called him on an August afternoon and asked him if he could fly to Montreal on a moment’s notice to take a small role in The Score, a 2001 movie that featured Robert DeNiro, Marlon Brando, Edward Norton and Angela Bassett.
He took the job, but didn’t make the final cut when DeNiro, briefly filling in as director that day on the shoot, decided Doman looked “too upscale” for the part of a hit man hired to kill Brando’s character. (More on that later.)
More recently, Doman, a Northeast Catholic High School and University of Pennsylvania grad, has spent a good deal of time in Baltimore, Md., filming scenes for his recurring role on the compelling HBO police drama The Wire.
His turn as the gruff Maj. William Rawls, head of the Baltimore homicide squad, is his second stint on a series telecast by the premium cable channel.
Doman, a Vietnam War veteran and former advertising executive who bailed out of the business to pursue acting, previously appeared as an incarcerated military officer who met a violent end in the prison series OZ, as the Times reported in a February 2001 profile of the Juniata Park native.
That Doman is repeatedly cast in official-type roles does not discourage the actor. He considers himself fortunate to be typecast, as do most professional actors trying to establish an identity in the crowded industry.
“I have a certain physical makeup that lends itself to authoritative roles, and that’s worked for me,” explained Doman. “I think it’s very important to get yourself typecast to get work. That’s true in this business. You want people to be able to put you in a category, to know how to use you. To get work, (casting directors) have got to be able to see you as something.
“Once you do that,” he added, “you can begin to break out of that mold and convince them that you can do other things.”
Doman is working on establishing himself as an individual brand, and he has made some impressive strides.
Three Blind Mice, a made-for-television movie shown on CBS last fall, was the first acting job that the former Marine landed solely on the quality of his reel — a collection of clips compiled by an actor to showcase his work.
In that film, Doman portrayed a Vietnam veteran, again familiar territory, who is accused of severely beating three men from the southeastern Asian country for allegedly assaulting his wife.
His two upcoming films, City by the Sea and Emmet’s Mark, find Doman portraying, not coincidentally, the captain of police homicide squads.
Notice a pattern here?
Though similarities often exist among Doman’s roles, he maintains that all have unique qualities.
“For instance, the last three jobs that I’ve had, I play the head of a police department homicide squad. While the position is the same,” he said, “each character is different. You get that from the scripts.”
In City by the Sea, Doman again works with DeNiro in the cop drama set in New York City. After bit parts in a host of films and television programs, Doman is scoring increasingly more face time with each appearance on the screen.
The actor describes his role in City by the Sea as “central” to the plot. It marks the third time he has worked on a DeNiro vehicle. The others were the corrupt-police drama Cop Land and the aforementioned The Score.
During filming of City by the Sea, Doman playfully reminded DeNiro about the Montreal incident.
“Two months later, I get the job on this movie, and we’re shooting in Asbury Park, and I approached Bob and he said to me, ‘Hey, I remember you,’” said Doman.
The two actors then shared a laugh.
The film is scheduled for a mid-September nationwide release.
Emmet’s Mark, meanwhile, is an independent film shot last year in Philadelphia. The filmmakers must secure a distribution deal so it can be released to theaters.
Doman, 57, was most recently in Philadelphia in January, when he was inducted into the Northeast Catholic High School Hall of Fame in the arts and entertainment category.
These days, Doman lives with his wife in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood in an outer borough of New York City just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Doman, when prompted, recalls vividly his personal experience on the morning of Sept. 11.
“That morning was a beautiful morning and I was eating breakfast with my wife at an outdoor cafe in the Heights, which is just across the river from Lower Manhattan, when we heard a radio report that said a plane had just hit a World Trade Center tower,” he recalled.
Doman assumed that a small aircraft had flown off course and struck the skyscraper. His wife trotted down the block, in the direction of the Hudson, to a point where the Manhattan skyline was visible.
“All of a sudden, we heard this tremendous explosion. People were running up the street, yelling, ‘We’re under attack!’” he continued. “My wife actually saw the second plane hit.
“I walked down to the promenade and just watched the buildings burn for a while. By that point, you could barely see Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the whole skyline was obliterated,” he said. “Within fifteen minutes, you couldn’t see anything because of all the dust. It was horrific.”