‘Fanelli’ Actor Finds Motivation Is Money

Joe Pantoliano makes no bones about why he is in the acting business; it’s for the money.

“If I could figure out a way to make this much money as a waiter, I’d do it in a second,” said the New Jersey-born actor who stars in NBC’s “The Fanelli Boys.”

“I was a good waiter. I liked being a waiter. And then you wouldn’t be bothered by 2,000 people coming up to you on the street. They wouldn’t be going, ‘What a great waiter. Every time I asked for my steak medium rare, it comes exactly like I ordered!’ ”

Pantoliano has a specific reason for his mercenary stance: a couple of years he spent living in the projects in Hoboken, N.J.

“When I was 10 years old my father had a heart attack and had to quit his job,” Pantoliano said. “It wasn’t like we were living in the lap of luxury then, but we had to move to the projects.

“I just remember thinking then that, one way or another, I was going to find a way to get out.”

Although a divorce and his mother’s remarriage eventually did get Joe out of the projects--still far from that lap of luxury, you understand--that drive never left him. However, it was going to be a tough road to the top for someone who even now chronicles his growing-up years by listing the succession of gangs he hung out with.

“In high school, I acted in a couple of plays, and two of my teachers told me that I could do this as a profession, but I had to work on my reading if I was going to be able to read scripts and learn my lines.”

As a senior, Pantoliano was reading on the third-grade level. “I was never any good at reading,” he said. “It turns out I was a little dyslexic. I had a teacher early on who called on me, heard I couldn’t read and told me to shut up and sit down.

“After that, on the first few days of school I’d always sit in the front row. The teacher would call on me to read something, see how bad I was, and I’d never get called on for the rest of the year.”

This time, though, Pantoliano applied himself and learned to read. When he graduated high school in the early ‘70s, he went to work waiting tables in New York and taking acting classes.

After a variety of regional theater and off-Broadway work, Pantoliano headed for Hollywood in 1976. He played the Frank Sinatra role of Maggio in the miniseries of “From Here to Eternity.”

He was Doc in “Eddie and the Cruisers,” the unforgettable Guido the pimp in “Risky Business,” Gino in “The Idolmaker,” a punk rocker named Snake in “Running Scared,” Richie Valens’ manager in “La Bamba,” and bail bondsman Eddie Moscone in “Midnight Run” among other roles.