Opinion: Luigi’s revenge
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As a fan of both John Leguizamo and celebrity memoirs, I’ve been enjoying Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends, the diminutive fireball’s warts-and-all mid-career retrospective. Some choice bits:
On Ellen Barkin: ‘That bent nose, that twisted face. She looks like whoever was sculpting her had a seizure toward the end. It’s sexy as hell. All you think about is doggy-style when you’re with her.’ On Steven Seagal: ‘I wanted to say, ‘You run like a big, fat girl.’ Because he does. Watch one of his movies sometime. If you can stand to. Runs like a big fat sissy doing double dutch.’ On Nicole Kidman: ‘[B]eing that low all the time, I got to peek up Nicole Kidman’s skirt. Let me just say the curtains match the carpet.’ On Brian Dennehy: ‘I think he was drying out at the time, so that made him a little edgy.’ On making What’s the Worst That Could Happen?:’That’s the worst that can happen to you—watching that movie.’
Leguizamo has a beef with Al Pacino’s lead performance in Carlito’s Way, writing: ‘I guess he got to play a Puerto Rican on the same reverse-affirmative-action program that let him play a Cuban in Scarface...Pacino is...really very good, in spite of all the people who say he’s very good. But his Nuyorican accent sounded like Foghorn Leghorn.’
This seems like a legitimate gripe, but if Leguizamo is going to complain about cross-ethnic casting, I’ve got three words for him: Super Mario Brothers. At a time when Italian-Americans everywhere were bellyaching about negative stereotypes in Mafia movies, Nintendo’s courageous plumbers were two positive, hard-working, mustachioed role models all sons of Italy could look to with pride. Yet when it came time to cast the film version of that game, Hollywood decided a Colombian and a rotund Cockney were ‘close enough’ for the movies.
Leguizamo took that part with a spritely Mario leap, and went on to play another great Italian-American role in the wonderful Spike Lee joint Summer of Sam. Did he worry about any of the great movie Italians—Tony Shalhoub, maybe, or Ben Affleck—he was putting out of work? Maybe someday all Italian parts will be reserved for true-blue paisans like Mercedes Ruehl and James Caan, thoroughbred Greeks like Andrea Martin and Anthony Quinn will get all the Greek roles, Jews will be limned by certified kosher performers like Stanley Tucci and John Turturro, and the Irish will only be played by true sons of Erin like the Estevez brothers and, um, James Caan. Until then, Leguizamo must accept his complicity in the ongoing hate crime of all-purpose-ethnic casting.