On Twin Tracks

Esai Morales is a philosopher, a storyteller, a performer, and he can talk a blue streak about everything from gender roles to racism to drug use. But just don’t ask this 39-year-old actor’s ideas to be crystal clear all the time. To his credit, he often knows when he’s veering off a life script, and on this afternoon he’s anticipating a scolding from his publicists and manager.

“There are people in my camp that are going to be upset by me opening up this much,” he says over lunch at Pace, a friend’s restaurant near Mount Olympus. “But maybe there’s someone out there who will read this, and it will help them. I’m using the media to promote personal evolution. Kind of like Oprah, but I’m not getting paid as much.... I was born misunderstood.”

He was born in Brooklyn, actually, the son of Puerto Rican parents. It is not the best pedigree for a career in Hollywood, where few roles are available for Latinos. But now, after 20 years of bouncing from one project to the next, Morales may finally have gotten his big break as the moral and dignified Lt. Tony Rodriguez on ABC’s “NYPD Blue.”

It has the potential to nudge him out of the rare space he occupies in Hollywood, a space that allows him to loom large among the neglected Latino acting community while surviving professionally as a bit player in the larger, predominantly white realm. His is a split-screen life in a town of hero worship where, depending on the audience, he is either a handsome, successful activist-star or a vaguely familiar-looking guy from that East L.A. movie a long time ago.

“While part of society doesn’t even know if you’re still in the biz, another part of society can’t believe they’re breathing the same air you’re breathing,” he says. “I’m very aware of the relativity of it all, and it informs me.”

“NYPD Blue” each week reaches more than 14 million viewers, an audience that stretches beyond the ghettoized audiences of many of his other projects, and the character is a dream role for Morales, who has spent plenty of years in front of the camera wearing a wife-beater undershirt and slurping the last drop of beer from the can.

His manager, Erik Kritzer, says Morales’ time has come.

“Every ‘overnight success’--it takes 10 years of hard work unless you get a lucky break. And the guys that do get a lucky break right away aren’t trained to handle it,” Kritzer says.

That hard work has come together in an unexpected trifecta of projects: In addition to “NYPD Blue,” Morales is starring in two groundbreaking television programs. On Showtime’s “Resurrection Blvd,” the first Latino drama on cable TV, he plays Paco, an alcoholic who attempts to repair his relationship with his college-age son. Things seem to be going well until he learns his son is gay (in an October episode), and he cuts off ties with him. The show’s creator and executive producer, Dennis Leoni, wrote the part for Morales.

On “American Family,” the first Latino drama on public television, which is scheduled to premiere in January, Morales plays a convict trying to piece together his life. The PBS and Showtime roles are typical of the deeply flawed characters he inhabits, even though he insists he has been selective since leaving New York’s School of Performing Arts more than two decades ago.

“Hollywood ... used my discretion against me. I didn’t want to play every Latino gangbanger,” he says, explaining why he turned down the role in “Stand and Deliver” (1987) that ultimately went to Lou Diamond Phillips. (The part brought Phillips a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actor.)

“Esai had a lack of exposure to mainstream projects in the past,” says friend Clifton Collins Jr., who appeared in “Traffic” and “The Last Castle.” “I’d like to see him be more mainstreamed. When we went over the [‘NYPD Blue’] scenes, it was really exciting to see him have such an opportunity for something so mainstream. He just needs a quality project to display what he’s able to do.”

Another friend, Balthazar Getty, casts the situation more starkly in terms of race.

“Being a Latino actor, you’re limited in terms of what parts you can play,” says Getty, who is now starring on Fox’s “Pasadena.” “It’s hard being an actor, and then on top of it, there’s even less work out there [for Latinos].”

Morales has taken up the issue personally. In 1997, he helped establish the National Foundation for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and he has testified before Congress about the paucity of Latino actors on television. He also won a seat on the board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild this fall. And he has taped a number of 30-and 60-second spots for the Centers for Disease Control’s anti-smoking campaign, in hopes that they will demystify the “cool” act of smoking for children of color. But he emphasizes that politics is not in his future because his personal life would never stand up to an opponent’s scrutiny.

Morales’ effect on a roomful of people seems to fall cleanly along racial lines. At functions for Latino entertainers, he is treated like a rock star, with nearly as many community commitments as fellow Latino actors Edward James Olmos and Jimmy Smits. Because his movie credits stretch back to “Bad Boys” in 1983, “La Bamba” in 1987 and “Mi Familia” in 1995, Morales has been making appearances at many of these events for years, and he is now gaining status as something of an elder in the activist Latino community. The women, almost without fail, adore him.

But as Collins says, if you were to drop him in a restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio, filled with white patrons, no one would raise an eyebrow. Morales jokes that it’s no coincidence his “big break” occurred when he landed a background part in the CBS drama “The White Shadow” 24 years ago. Since then he has lived in two Hollywoods, one for whites and one for everyone else. The result is a strong sense of responsibility to a very clearly defined fan base.

“When you’re a Latino and you have some degree of talent, people anoint you a role model, whether you want that or not. You can’t explore. You can’t take a walk on the wild side without threatening that status,” he says.

He recalls a heady and humiliating time in 1988 when he was appearing on thousands of movie screens across the country as Ritchie Valens’ resentful older brother in “La Bamba.” The film received a Golden Globe nomination for best drama. Inspired by the clout he was enjoying within the Latino community for his performance, Morales tried to get some big-name actors to help him raise money for a charity. He called one at home, and the A-list actor put him on speakerphone, saying, “Call my assistant. I’m watching the ballgame.” Morales winces when he tells the story, but he doesn’t slow down in the telling. “I heard people in the background laughing.... I felt so terrible.”

More recently, a friend who knows Morales is a crossword addict sent him a puzzle from a major daily newspaper with a note that said, “You’ve made it!” Morales knew better. His three-vowel first name has shown up in puzzles before. “You don’t understand,” he told his friend. “I’m so obscure--that’s why I make it into the harder [puzzles].”

In fact, when Mark Tinker, a director on “NYPD Blue,” saw the audition roster for Lt. Rodriguez, he recognized one name right away.

“I had only seen his name in crossword puzzles,” says Tinker, who directed Morales in the season premiere.

No one can accuse Morales of being too slick or calculating. Unlike many actors who give rote answers to reporters or who stage situations that make their life seem like a commercial, Morales greets me at the front door in bare feet, in mid-conversation about the $1,000 blown-glass lamps that arrived that week.

“I need feminine things in my life or it becomes unbalanced,” he says, walking back to the bedroom where a golden lamp covered in delicately painted flowers sits on his dresser. “I’m so comfortable with my sexuality that I can have feminine things in my life. When men repress women, the person they most repress is the woman inside them.”

In the backyard of his new 2,480-square-foot Los Angeles house, a friend’s rabbit hops around a cage near the pool. There’s a cat wandering around too, and the house feels open and uncluttered, with a few heavy pieces of wood furniture and some pre-Columbian artifacts. Morales bought this house with money made entertaining primarily Latino audiences, but he points out that even with his role on “NYPD Blue,” he has yet to break the $1-million salary threshold that he says will prove to him he has arrived in Hollywood.

Morales has another story he wants to tell. This one lasts for a startling 23 minutes. With no moral, punch line or end in sight, I wonder aloud if I should be taking notes. Nah, he says. It gets good, really good, he says. It never really gets anywhere. Morales is just warming up. Over the next few hours, topics swing wildly from the serious to the loopy. He talks about his mother, his Pentecostal father, New York, Woody Harrelson, the demonization of marijuana and his childhood performance as a piece of sizzling bacon that impressed recruiters from Juilliard. He also mentions that he’s “a Libra until the bitter end” and that he has just played softball on the same team with Al Pacino.

Morales’ future is equally diffuse. There’s no big plan, although he knows he doesn’t want children. “It’s too much of a responsibility to have them and then struggle to maintain and augment a standard of living while maintaining and augmenting a quality of life that includes real and profound relationships with people around you,” says the actor, who is single. “To have a child, you want to make sure there’s enough of you to make sure it doesn’t get sucked up in the mass-market culture.”

I choose not to pursue this line of questioning, but Morales won’t stop talking. He is refreshingly unchoreographed, but his energy level is unmanageable at times.

“He’s so fired up all the time, and then to contain that and funnel it into this buttoned-down character is a fascinating metamorphosis,” says Tinker, the director. “There’s a nice dignity to the character that can be at odds with Esai’s silliness.”

After zipping over Mulholland Drive in his new Lexus, Morales drops me off at my car and says he’s worried that he may have exposed himself too much today. He asks about some of the things he said, but I’m a little carsick, and my notebook is filled with speeches and phrases dotted with ellipses.

A few days later, when I call to clarify some of his anecdotes, he’s writing his platform for the SAG ballot and he talks for 15 minutes about his involvement in union activities. He could talk forever.

A few weeks later, watching the premiere of “NYPD Blue,” I try to reconcile Morales with Lt. Rodriguez, a role that may let him connect with a vast new audience. It is impossible; Morales had only a few lines in each of the one-hour programs, which appeared Nov. 6-7. When Rodriguez addressed his detectives, his thoughts were cautious, pitch perfect and succinct.

“He brings a very different feel to that squad room,” says Steven Bochco, the show’s creator. “Esai brings a kind of quietness to the role, which we hadn’t necessarily written into the part.”

Bochco adds that Morales’ audition banished doubts that he might look too young for such a mature part.

“We just cast him right away.... He was so strong and intense and terrific. He’s such a wonderful actor. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a great-looking man,” Bochco says. “The unfortunate reality of television is that it tends to typecast and stereotype, and it doesn’t mainstream minorities without prodding. So I think somebody like Esai winds up having a more interesting career in film.... You don’t usually think, ‘Let’s put Esai Morales in this series.’ ”