The talented Danny Pino easily transitions between film and television roles and can currently be seen playing Detective Scotty Valens in the hit CBS drama Cold Case, which was the number-one new drama on television in 2004.
Danny recently wrapped production on Andy Garcia’s directorial debut entitled Lost City, which was shot on location in the Dominican Republic; Between, which co-stars Poppy Montgomery and Adam Kaufman; and the independent film Sin Receta, which also stars Colin Hanks and Eric Balfour.
Danny’s television credits include the critically-acclaimed telefilm Lucy, in which he starred as Desi Arnaz, and the series The Shield. Danny’s other television credits include Point of Origin and Men, Women, & Dogs.
Danny has an extensive theatre background. He starred opposite Madonna in Up for Grabs in London’s West End. He also starred with Billy Crudup in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s productions of Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale.
Danny was born in Miami and currently lives in LA with his wife Lilly. More information at https://imdb.com/name/nm0992694.
Everybody has stories of doing a play for the family at three years old. I don’t have that. I pretended more playing army and being a soldier and protecting my house. I would play like my house was our castle, our fortress. I would hide in wait to ambush cars that would come by as I pretended to shoot ’em up and run back, retreat.
I was acting. I didn’t know back then but that’s exactly what I was doing. To me it was so real. When you’re doing it you’re not thinking, “I’m doing this to prepare for my acting career.” You do it because you are a kid. I think back and think about what is the foundation of what I do now. I look back at that and I was always sort of the dramatic one. My older brother and I would do that all the time. We would play CHiPs with our Big Wheels. Nobody ever really died in CHiPs but every day when I played it, I’d die. I’d die every day in that role. For me, Poncherello would die every day. I’d be like, “Go on. Go on. I can’t make it.” I’d roll my Big Wheel over. I was always sort of the guy who had a penchant for just pushing the dramatic. Always.
It was sixth grade when I did a play. I was involved in sports my entire youth, growing up. I was always playing baseball or soccer or football or something. I was always doing extracurricular things. It was always school and then everything else. Acting and being on stage was part of that. I kind of lumped them all together. In sixth grade, the play was called Tracers of the Lost Parts of Speech. It was an educational piece. There were nouns and verbs and pronouns running across the stage and nobody died, which I found very disappointing. I tried to change the script but of course the writer would not budge. I played a professor. I’m there in sixth grade and the professor must’ve been like seventy. They colored my hair silver. It was a musical. I had been in choir and I was singing and always involved in a bunch of different things. That was my first experience on stage. I realized that I really liked it. It was fun.
I was recruited to go to a performance magnet program for middle school. My mother and I—and my father—we sat together and talked about it. My mother, who was a teacher, said, “I think it’s really important that you not limit yourself right now. I think it’s really important that you don’t give yourself a title. I think it’s important that you have a very broad education.” I said, “All right. I’m not going to go to the magnet school. I’m going to go to a regular school and I’m going to take all the courses and do sports and all of those things you can do at a regular school and not at the magnet school.” So, that’s what I did. Same thing with high school; there were these magnet programs that were ideal for an actor or musician. My mom advised me the same way: “You want to play football in high school. You want to play baseball in high school. When else do you get to do that?” I was like, “Y’know what, Mom, I think you’re right.” So, I did that. Of course, I went out for the football team. I didn’t play. Of course, I went out for the baseball team. I didn’t play. The reason I didn’t play was because there was a play every single time and I always chose to do the play. So, back then I always thought, “I’m such a quitter. How can I not play football when I love playing sports? How can I not play baseball?” I wanted to play sports but the play was there and all my friends were in the Drama department and so I just felt compelled to do the play. Back then I felt like such a quitter: “I’m just doing a play.”
I think for me it was like I didn’t have enough time in the day to do everything. I was a typical overachiever. I was vice president of student council, I was president of the law club, I was the typical sort of guy who was a seemingly borderline nerd but had these parents who raised me in such a cool way that I was able to come across as more mainstream and I was friends with a lot of different groups. I actually had a lot of different interests. I always felt that high school was pretty stressful only because I was so involved with so many things that I always felt bad saying no to something. It’s still the hardest thing for me now. The hardest word for me is no.
Was your family supportive?
Yes. They were and they are. It’s important for me to say that my brothers keep me grounded. They’re all in Miami. We’re five boys. My wife also, of course, does that job well, but if anything slips through the cracks, they are there for me. Other than my wife, they really are my best friends. When they watch something that they don’t think is what they expected, they—in a very supportive way—will let me know. Mostly, they’ve just been there to congratulate me, support me, and encourage me. I’ve been extremely blessed and fortunate several times over for several lifetimes. I’ve been given a very fortunate situation with my family.
With my family, it was never a professional thing: “Oh, you want to be an actor? Let’s get you out there, do commercials, earn your money.” It was never like that. In fact, I remember watching a movie—I think it was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—I remember seeing it and thinking, “That would be so cool; to do what they do, to have the attention of an audience and to really (for an hour, two hours, three hours) transform their lives into whatever world it is that you’re putting into their living room or putting on the big screen in that theatre.” It’s almost like that hour of playing outside and defending your house. It’s not your house anymore; it’s the castle. You’re giving them that, hopefully, for that bit of time. There’s power in that. That helps people see what it is we’re all going through: what this life is about and why are we here and what’s our identity. Who do I really want to be and who am I and how do I appease that gap between who I want to be and who I am? Essentially, that’s what the characters go through in the arc of a story. It’s a very universal thing to explore.
I must’ve been thirteen or fourteen and must’ve watched a movie like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly or Young Guns or a coming-of-age story like The Karate Kid, where it’s inspirational. And I’d be like, “I really want to be involved with something like that.” I remember picking up the Yellow Pages in Miami. My mother had said, “If you want to do it, it’s totally on you. I’m not pushing you to do this.” I looked up agencies in Miami and started making phone calls. I’m sure they realized they were talking to either a thirteen-year-old boy or a forty-year-old woman. My voice hadn’t started to crack yet. I was pursuing it like that. Nothing ever came of that; it was just an afternoon making phone calls. My mom just let me go through the motions of that. She never got on the phone, she never made any phone calls, she just let me go through what I was going through. That slowly died away and I played sports and I continued to do my thing and just be a normal kid.
I did a number of plays in high school that got a lot of attention. We won a bunch of awards in state competitions and stuff like that and that caused Florida International University (the school that I ultimately got my BFA from) to take notice. They came over and watched some of the plays and they offered me a scholarship. I was still using theatre to achieve something else. I was taking theatre courses to have my scholarship in order to study law or in order to study engineering. I was always looking at something else. Theatre was always an after school thing. It was never studying. It was a sport or an extra curricular activity or belonging to a club. It was an interest, a hobby. And this was all without knowing that I was actually learning a lot from it. It was actually informing my life.
I think the more characters you play, the more masks you play, the deeper and more textured your fabric is, the more texture you add to your own character because you have put on that life and you have learned, hopefully, something from the choices or the mistakes that that character has made and it informs you. So, totally as a tangent, I was learning these things but I was pursuing scholastically something else. I was in the honor society and in the honors college, but the theatre department was paying for it. It came time for me to choose a major and I was like, “Man, I don’t know.” I couldn’t decide if I wanted to go into engineering (which ultimately, probably, I wouldn’t have been able to do because those guys are much too smart—lots of math—which I wasn’t bad at, but there’s too much. Too much math) or law. So, the law part of it I started pursuing and I remember filing for an emphasis in pre-Law, so I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in pre-Law.
I was studying for the LSAT when my father and I sat down. My mother was always a big fan of whatever I decided to do. She was always a cheerleader for anything as long as I really wanted to do it. My dad, not so much. My dad was very practical. Both my parents are Cuban. They were both born in Cuba. Their parents, my grandparents, came to the United States without anything. They really had to abandon everything. So, my grandfather came from Cuba being a sugar engineer and the vice mayor of their town, Union de Reyes, to assume a dishwashing job in Miami and he died as a security guard at the Miami Sea Aquarium. My grandmother, who is an inspiration, was a secretary in Cuba and came to Miami and worked in a sweatshop. The same story applies to my father’s parents. They were prominent in Cuba—they were middle class—and they came to the United States and had to start over. So, it was very important in my family to take on a practical profession, especially if you were going to study it in school. Make it count. Earn your money. Something stable. Something that you can fall back on as something solid. My parents did the same. But given the choice, my mom would’ve still chosen to be a teacher. She still followed her passion but in something practical. My father got his Bachelor’s in Psychology but ultimately went into investing and banking, something also very practical. They knew they needed to build a foundation for us, which I’m so grateful for every day.
Acting is not a practical thing. It’s not a practical field. At FIU we were asked—as part of the requirements to graduate—to do something called the senior project. It was something we did on our own. We could take an existing play and put it on ourselves and produce it and direct it and act in it or create something on our own. And I chose to write a one-person play about the last hour and fifteen minutes of Edgar Allan Poe’s life. The project was only supposed to be half an hour, but mine turned into more like an hour and fifteen minutes. Poe was found in a gutter. Supposedly alcohol had an adverse effect on his brain, which caused him to go into hallucinations and convulsions and they found him in the gutter and he ultimately died from that. I took that last portion of his life where he’s in the bed in a hospital and made those hallucinations part of how he went in and out of his short stories and poems. So he was literally in bed and immediately the lights would change and the music would change and The Raven would start happening and it was all just part of his life. All these characters that he made would start up. With the help of a lot of friends, I was putting it together; writing it, performing it. I had a friend direct it. Doing that—it made acting not a hobby.
That was the beginning of opening the door to thinking acting was what I was going to do. I think the sheer investment, the time, the emotional aspect to put all of that together, that’s what did it. I’m sure I could look back at the tape and think, “Wow, that really was awful,” but what actually is on stage at that time and what your perception is of how important it was are sometimes really different. So it’s not really all that important what the actual performance was as much as what it meant to me in my development as an artist. To me, it’s one of those times I look back on and know was one of those moments that was a defining moment for several different reasons.
Personally, I was able to invest in something so much that I was able to see myself being much more serious about it. Also, I got the attention of some of my teachers at FIU and, most importantly, I got my dad’s attention. There was a teacher at FIU who said, “Danny, I think you need to go to graduate school. I think what we prepare you for here is graduate school. I don’t think you can come from here and go into the profession without getting serious training.” I took that advice very seriously. I was studying for my LSAT at the time and I started looking into graduate schools on my own for acting. And then I had a meeting with my father, sitting down for breakfast one morning. He was like, “How’s the LSAT going?” I said, “Yeah, it’s going really well. I’m studying. It’s coming up in a few months. But I really want to talk to you about acting.” He was like, “What about it? That show was great, by the way. That show was really wonderful. I was very proud of you.” I was like, “Thanks, Dad. I really appreciate that. If I get into one of the three schools that I want to get into, I’m going to grad school instead of law school.” He said, “Okay.” He left it at that. I thought it was going to be much harder than it was.
So, I auditioned for graduate schools and I got into the graduate school I wanted to get into. I went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts’ Graduate Acting Program. I auditioned for Yale and UCSD and a fair amount of them actually, University of Minnesota, I auditioned for a bunch of schools. I went to NYU and studied under Ron Van Lieu.
For me, every single project I work on, every character, has Ron’s stamp on it. He has that kind of effect on an actor. Ron will tell you how it is without anything personal—you can take it personally and often times I did—but having distance from the school and having several professional credits and projects that I’ve worked on; I see he was right. He was right. He’s sort of the Yoda of acting. If you met him, you wouldn’t know that. In fact, he would hate that I said that. He is so unassuming. He would think that I’m silly and ridiculous and I’m completely over-blowing the whole thing. I remember one day in class, we were doing A Streetcar Named Desire and I was in my first year. I really wanted to prove that I deserved to be one of the people that got into the program. I’m up there with Nadia Bowers and he says, “Okay, stop, stop, stop, stop. Stop the scene.” I’m into it. I’m playing Stanley and probably my shirt’s undone and I’m all sweaty. He says, “What were you thinking there, Danny?” And I said, “Well, Ron, I was trying to come over to Nadia so that I could deliver this line.” And he said, “So you could what?” And I was like, “Well, I was trying to come over and deliver this line.” And he was like, “What?” And I said, “Deliver this line?” And he slowly stood up, slowly stood up, just ever so slowly started walking toward me and said, “So you could what?” And I started backing away going, “Get away from me, Ron!” But from that point on, I realized what he meant: You’re not delivering lines. There’s no script. There’s no stage direction. None of that. That’s all bullshit. None of that exists. It’s the interpersonal relationship between those two characters that exists at that time. If there’s blocking, it’s secondary to the connection between the two characters. It should not be something that dictates what you’re doing. That’s just one example of Ron. When I say I was intimidated by this man, backing me up, asking what I was doing, let me say that he’s like five-seven, five-eight and a buck-twenty dripping wet. Yoda is the perfect example. He is the Yoda of acting. Yale’s really smart to have brought him on to their team. He definitely changed me as an actor and a person.
What do you consider your first break?
NYU. But, you know, it’s hard to say that there is a break. I don’t necessarily see it that way. I think it’s all a process. To say that there’s a break, there’s an unbroken line from imagining you’re defending your house to being on the big screen or being on television. There’s an unbroken line. To say that there’s a big break, everything prepares you for the next step. Everything prepares you. If you’re smart enough and you realize that no matter how small your role is, or however small your school is, or however little experience you have, if you can take any of those little experiences that you consider little—but that I think are as monumental as being cast in a Steven Spielberg movie—I think each and every one of those carries its own weight. So, to say that there’s a big break, I think that is sort of shortsighted.
I don’t think of the business. I don’t know how the business perceives me. I really don’t. I don’t know. I’m always surprised when people say, “Yeah, we’ll have him on board.” I’m like, “Really? Cool. All right. Let’s do this thing!” Absolutely. It’s just another opportunity to play. I don’t know if I can point at one thing and say, “This is my big break.” I know that NYU is one of those places where you’re surrounded by such talented people in your class—as well as in the faculty—and you’re also living in New York City, so you’re seeing all this live theatre and you’re surrounded by all of these directors. It’s a melting pot of all of these talented people and everybody’s kind of feeding off each other, being inspired off of each other and you just want to create. You can’t not create. It’s infectious.
What made you choose Los Angeles?
I stayed in New York for about a year and a half after I finished the graduate program at NYU. Not that long. Many different things made me choose LA over New York. I’d done a few plays; I went to Williamstown (that was a great experience), I’ve done Shakespeare in the Park twice, I did a workshop at Lincoln Center. I was working steadily in New York, but I was also waiting tables at night. Doing workshops during the day, waiting tables at night. It was the typical actor’s journey: having to grind it through and have your survival gig so that you can be asked to play again. I thought I wanted to be in New York because I felt it was less of a name game than LA, but an experience in New York made me feel it was also a name game in New York. I felt like that was being played there as well. There are a lot of productions in New York that are very expensive and they need names to fill the seats to cover the production. That’s a very real situation. I thought, “Well, if I’m going to play the name game in New York and struggle with the opportunities potentially being less in New York than they are in LA—at least that’s what I was hearing—let me go and see what LA has to offer during pilot season.” This is what a lot of actors do. A lot of New York actors come out here for pilot season.
I came out with a bicoastal agent and I signed with a manager out here. I felt I was being covered in New York by my agency but that I needed to have an ear to the ground on the West Coast so I signed with a manager out here. My manager facilitated me flying out. In fact, the management company paid for my trip out because I didn’t have the money to pay for it. I had to reimburse them, of course, because it is a business. I came out and I was very fortunate.
When somebody says, “Aren’t you happy that you’ve been able to achieve what you’ve achieved?” I just look back and I’m like, “Y’know what? I didn’t achieve anything. There were so many points along the way where other people contributed so much that without those people it would’ve never happened. Or maybe it would’ve happened but it would’ve never happened the way it has actually transpired.” It’s not my achievement. The reason I say that is because when I came out to LA, I had a friend who let me stay at his place for four months. That allowed me to audition. My wife (who wasn’t my wife yet—we met in junior high and have been together the entire time) came out here with me for pilot season and she taught English at a university so that we could eat. We had a place to stay, but I wasn’t going to ask my friend to feed us. If anything, I was going to try to feed him because we were staying at his place. So, she went to work while I went on auditions.
When we came to LA, I went to Rent-A-Wreck and got a Ford Festiva. I’m trying to go up La Cienega in this reddish, rusted out Ford Festiva with racing stripes. And there’s always this guy who pulls up right on your tail in a Mercedes Bens automatic V-12 and you’re just looking back going, “I’m going to nail you when I roll back!” I don’t think it had an emergency brake. This thing was a wreck! We went to Universal Citywalk and went to the movie; we had valeted the car. When I came back and everybody’s waiting—a huge amount of people waiting for their cars—there’s Seal waiting for his car and down the ramp I see four dudes pushing my car. They’re trying to start the damn car. They opened the hood, I swear the car’s aflame. It’s on fire. The battery, the foam flowing. I called Rent-A-Wreck and they replaced the car. You get a very reliable car, sometimes. And it’s very cheap. It got me from audition to audition until I was able to book a pilot my first season out here. It made it, it got picked up. It was a WB pilot called Men, Women & Dogs.
Before that, the first thing I tested for they actually flew me out of New York to test out here. That was trippy. I was at CBS and there’s a big picture of Elvis. I’m thinking, “Man, this place looks kind of familiar, where he’s standing. Oh, man, I’m standing where Elvis was standing. Wow. This is LA. This is what the west coast is about. It’s celebrity. But I want my art! I’m studying theatre! I’m a trained actor! But, man, that’s really cool.” Literally, you go down into the basement and it’s like a little home theatre. They have maybe twenty seats in there and it’s raked for the audience, it’s very dark, and there’s like four or five guys. Sometimes we all look the same, sometimes we don’t. This first test, we didn’t look anything alike. We were a bunch of different looking guys. We all go in and do our thing, we come out, we call our agent, and hear, “We don’t know anything yet but I’m sure we will soon and we’ll give you a call.” I didn’t get it and I was very disappointed because I was sure this was “it.” But that’s how there’s no break. What it did was inform what the next network test was going to be like. The next time I was in that room, I was a lot more confident and the next time I was in that room, I booked it. It’s about learning from those experiences, not necessarily whether you succeed or fail in that particular experience. It sounds a little cliché, but it’s what I believe and that’s what’s helped me.
My first pilot season, I remember I auditioned for this movie. First of all, the casting director didn’t necessarily want to see me because the director was with my agency and the agency went directly to the director and the director brought me in which made the casting director feel a little bypassed. But I came in nonetheless. I read. I think I gave an okay read. I know I prepared a lot for it. Well, the director and the casting director couldn’t even sit down. They looked like little kids. They were like, “You’re perfect. You’re just perfect. I love the way you did that. Let’s do this again. Let’s try this.” It was playing. It was so energized. The room was so energized. I thought, “I got my first thing.” I’d been out here for about a month and a half and I was so ecstatic and I knew my wife Lilly would be ecstatic because she was working just as hard as I was. I knew my friend would be happy because he had given up a lot of his comfort having us there. It just all came together for this movie. They were so excited in the room that they said, “We’ve got to be quiet. There are still guys outside that are auditioning for this, but we just know you’re perfect.” So I left the audition and I called my agent and my manager and I said, “I think I got my first job.” They were like, “Not so fast. Let’s call. Let’s make sure.”
“But they said!” I had been to enough auditions to know that it never happens that they tell you that you have it in the room with guys still outside. Unless it was Totally Hidden Video or something, I had it. They told me! Sure enough, three days later, they were like, “They really loved you but the producers don’t know who you are and they’re giving the role to an A-list actor.” That was really hard. It was a hard lesson. But there are several hard lessons. As long as you know that even that audition is part of informing who you are and the power that you have in that room, you’re okay. That’s the only thing you can control: how you prepare for an audition, how much you prepare for an audition, and how—when you go into that room—you make it your own. When you walk out of that room, you want to feel like you gave your best.
I used to call my family and be like, “Oh my God, this is it. I think this is the one.” I would tell them all about the project. I don’t tell them anything now. They don’t even ask anymore. There’s a code. “So, are things going well?” No specifics. I think they get even more disappointed than I do. I’ve learned to make my time the time that I’m in that room. If you’re looking for work, the time that you’re in that room is your chance, your opportunity to act. That’s your opportunity to go in there to work, go in there and play. Those two worlds should cross paths. That should apply to auditions as well as the bookings.
How do you handle being recognized?
It doesn’t really happen that often, to tell you the truth. I have run into some people that recognize me and like the show, they like Cold Case, or they recognize me from Lucy and start quoting Desi lines. Those who do recognize me usually do from The Shield because Armadillo Quintero was such a memorable character. I usually know by the way that they look at me where they know me from. Armadillo gets a very unsure, uneasy kind of stare, but still it really doesn’t happen that often.
I did a play in London with Madonna. That’s fame. People were coming after me at the stage door because I was on the stage with her. That’s fame. We couldn’t go to dinner. My wife and I, and Madonna, we couldn’t go out. It seemed like a thunderstorm because there were so many flashes going off from the photographers.
It makes me feel good when somebody recognizes me for the work that I’ve done. You do like to feel like you’re affecting people and that people appreciate you and that you’re not doing your work in a vacuum, although you probably would if you were given the opportunity anyway because it’s what you love to do. But that is a huge component. You can’t forget that there’s an audience out there and you can’t forget that there are people out there who love your work or maybe even hate your work and that that exists. And sure you want people to like your work. You want to feel appreciated. You want people to give you a pat on the back. But that’s certainly not why I do it. I think that if you’re a good actor and you focus on your craft and with every performance (if you’re on TV, every episode; if you’re in film, every movie; if you’re looking for a job, every audition), if you take every chance you have to improve yourself and push your craft, then fame and notoriety and the acknowledgement and the awards and all that, that’s just residue of hard work and some luck. And it’s hard work from a lot of people, sacrifices from a lot of sources. From your manager, to your publicist, to your lawyer, to your agents, to your mom and dad, to your brother, to your best friend, to your wife; I mean the list is endless. And then all of a sudden, people might know you. But you’re the figurehead of an iceberg that goes much deeper.
What is your favorite thing about being an actor?
There are so many favorite things about being an actor! I think you’re a student of humanity. I think you’re a student of why we’re here and what we do with the time we’re here, what other people choose to do, what other characters choose to do with the time that they’re allotted. I think you’re literally studying choices and that’s fascinating. Every time you read a script, even if you have no part in that project, every time you read a script, every time you do a reading, it’s like you’re putting on the shoes for an hour. Just to read through something to help a friend out who just wrote a script, you’re stepping out of yourself. And you’re stepping out of having to pay the phone bill, having to put dishes in the dishwasher.
I feel like that psychology, the feeling of taking something from an idea—even if it’s someone else’s idea—from the black and white of a page to the three-dimensional presentation of who that person is (or was, if you’re playing a historic figure), there’s something that informs you. You can’t help but feel changed at the end of a project. You can’t help it!
I remember doing Desi; I wanted to continue doing it. It was huge for me. I remember wanting the role so bad. That’s really one of the first auditions I went into the audition as the character. I didn’t want them to know that I didn’t have a dialect, that I didn’t have an accent. I didn’t want them to know who I was. I didn’t want them to know anything about me. I wanted to go in as Desi. We would talk about all kinds of stuff but I’d be talking about it with his dialect, with his cadence, with how I saw him move. I was studying a lot for that audition. I really gave into that. I thought, “This is the role you’ve got to cast a Cuban American in. You’ve got to stick with that.” I wanted it so bad. Once it was offered to me I thought, “What have I done? What am I going to do now?” It turned from this aggressive desire to do the role to this wanting to run away fear. It was pretty amazing. But it was a study.
How do you prepare for a role?
While I was auditioning for the role of Desi, I was looking at tapes. I bought the DVD of some of the first season of the I Love Lucy show and I recorded his voice. I would just listen to his voice all day. And it was well written, the scenes that they gave me to audition with. I studied the scenes over and over again. I was really prepared for that. He wrote a book, thankfully, and I drew a lot from that as to who he was and what his principles were from his own words. I watched a lot of film, a lot of tape, a lot of video, anything I could get my hands on.
People would think, “Oh, being Cuban you’ll be able to do the dialect ’cause you’re Cuban and he’s Cuban,” but I’m two generations removed. On top of that, going to school where they sort of beat any regionalism out of you, I was totally neutral. That actually helped. When I was in speech class, I was thinking, “What am I going to use this for? I’m never going to use this! Let’s do some acting!” But now I have a technique that I can anchor into. Even with Armadillo, I was playing a Mexican, much different from a Cuban dialect. Now playing Scotty Valens, somebody who’s from the northeast—from Philadelphia no less—and a Philadelphia accent is really difficult to get. I’m still working on that! With any accent, I usually work at it on my own only because I know what those accents sound like. I’ve met people from each place and recorded their voices. I spent so much time in speech class that I know the difference in the vowels and consonants and cadence. And when, occasionally, I do have a question, I can call NYU. I know where to go.
Everybody was really enthusiastic about Desi. I learned how to play the congas, the guitar, I learned about his family’s exile from Cuba, which parallels my family’s. His was twenty-five, thirty years prior, but still, having everything and then coming to Miami with nothing. It gave me a soapbox. Whenever I was asked a question about Desi, I was able to pay homage to my grandparents from a personal place. My grandmother, who is still with us, was able to hear it on different Spanish radio shows that I was talking on or read in different newspapers or magazines in which I was interviewed. I would always mention her name and let her know that her grandson could’ve never decided to pursue an artistic desire had she not been in a sweatshop. She gave me that choice. I always remind her of that. That’s one of the perks of the business; that I can do that publicly.
Who are your favorite actors?
Andy Garcia. I think he has a way of being. Most great actors do. They’re not acting, they’re being. They just are. I remember watching Godfather: Part III. He was, in my opinion, one of the best things of the movie (if not the best thing in the movie). Taking the role of Sonny’s son and making it believable that he was Sonny’s son with the aggressiveness, the impulsiveness that he imbued the character with was reminiscent of Sonny and yet he made it his own. He wasn’t replicating anything. He wasn’t indicating that he was the son of Sonny. He was just it. He was it. He was being. That’s a difficult thing. It looks easy. That’s the amazing part. When you watch a baseball game, the best players make it look easy. When you watch a football game, the best players make it look easy. He makes it look easy. I had the opportunity to work with him last summer. He directed. He made it look easy; even the directing. He’s just one of those guys that is infinitely talented. He’s a musician, he’s an actor, he’s a family man, he’s a writer. He’s a renaissance man. He’s one of those guys that you look up to and you hope to emulate.
Raul Julia for the same reasons. His career was so diverse, just so infinitely diverse. He did everything—from comedy to musicals to drama to Shakespeare—so well. He’s like one of those guys that if I had to audition against him, I’d hate him, but he was so damn good that he would up the ante. He’d raise the bar. He’d make everyone else want to be better. Andy does that too. Working with Andy you’re like, “I want to be better.” That’s cool. It makes you feel less prone to be complacent, which is easy to do in LA. It’s difficult to do that in New York. The energy of the city, you’re out there, you’re doing it. But in LA you can be complacent.
Robert Duvall. He’s great. Daniel Day-Lewis. These are people that I’ll go watch their films just because they’re in it. People that are my contemporaries: Johnny Depp. I think that he pushes himself. Javier Bardem is bold, both with his choice of material and within a performance. He continues to challenge himself and the way the public sees him. There’s so many good actors out there and I get inspired by a lot of them. To mention a few, I’m leaving out others who inspire me for other reasons.
This interview was conducted on January 18, 2005, and it originally appeared in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors by Bonnie Gillespie and Blake Robbins, available at Amazon.