Dolphins’ Ex-Lineman Scrimmages With Eddie Murphy in ‘Gentleman’

In “The Distinguished Gentleman,” Victor Rivers finally gets to lighten up.

“It’s my first comedy of any substance,” says the Cuban-born actor, who made his screen debut playing a gang member in 1984’s “Eight Million Ways to Die.” In “Gentleman,” Rivers co-stars with Eddie Murphy and Sheryl Lee Ralph as a trio of scam artists who plot to get Murphy elected to Congress. The actor’s take on his character, Armando, “is sort of a ‘Mr. Lopez Goes to Washington.’ ”

Rivers points out that his ethnic dark looks have often found him cast him as the heavy--and indeed, he’s back as a San Quentin warlord in Taylor Hackford’s “Blood In, Blood Out,” due in February. “You probably won’t recognize me, because I’m covered head to toe in tattoos--and I’m 30 pounds heavier. A real scary guy. When I’d go out from the hotel jogging, the sheriffs would follow me every night.”

Rivers (ne Rivas) admits that he did flirt with gang life as a teen.

“In my day, in the ‘70s, we fought with our hands,” says the actor, who was simultaneously a street gang member and senior class president. Moving with his family from Cuba to Chicago to Hawthorne to Miami, Rivers found an outlet from home tensions in football, and was given a scholarship at Florida State University (where he majored in criminology and considered going into Air Force intelligence), but was drafted as an offensive lineman for the Miami Dolphins, playing 1978-79.

“I’d always wanted to act, but never had the time in college,” he says. After Rivers was cut from the Dolphins, actor Steven Bauer (whose parents had adopted Rivers when he ran away from home as a teen) suggested he come to California and give show biz a try. The head of casting at MGM promptly spotted him in a play and gave him a shot on the Robert Blake series “Dancer,” playing a drug dealer. “I had one line,” Rivers recalls, “and that was it. The bug bit.”