John Leguizamo: One-Man Firebrand

Actor John Leguizamo turns his tumultuous personal life into street-smart comedy—and dishes out sharp insights about love, family disasters and the shaky male ego.

By PT Staff, published on March 01, 2005 - last reviewed on April 29, 2008

"I love my kids. I'm gonna raise them a lot different than my parents raised me—because my parents damaged me. I love them for that, because it made me who I am today. But my kids don't need to be that successful." It's a quintessential John Leguizamo riff—and it's true, besides. The 40-year-old actor-comedian has in fact been strikingly successful. With more than 50 films to his credit, he's played everything from a sex-obsessed disco prince (Summer of Sam) to an ambitious anchorman in Cronicas, a morally ambiguous film about a serial killer. But Leguizamo is beloved for his one-man shows, several of which were made into HBO comedy specials, and one of which, Freak, won an Emmy. The monologues are frank about heartbreak, sex, racial suspicion, sex, being a teenage loser, sex, the pain of divorce and sex, but Leguizamo's real power is in his physical presence. He struts the stage in tight jeans, tattoo and Queens-bred attitude, radiating a kinetic mix of humor and vulgarity, offending and charming in the same breath. It's amazing what he can get away with. The core of his act is over-the-top impersonations: his king-of-the-hill grandfather, his squabbling parents and the various women he's chased, bedded, disappointed and been disappointed by. Much of his act turns on precise—and hilarious—depictions of the ways men and women completely fail to understand each other. He spoke with PT's Kathleen McGowan about modern fatherhood and the lighter side of family malice.

PT: A lot of your act spoofs stereotypes—how do you play with prejudices without antagonizing your audience?

JL: I don't want to be a placebo. I want people to be shaken up a little. I don't mind a lowbrow fart-dick joke so long as I've earned it somehow. The struggle is to go to all those levels. I love all my characters, even the ones I'm attacking. That's why I'm an actor. It makes me appreciate differences and oddities, things that other people are put off or bored by.

You were born in Colombia, and your father is Puerto Rican. What perspective does that give you on U.S. family life?

Growing up here in Queens it was just nuclear family: dad, mom and my brother. Quiet. Too tired from work. Get home. Turn on the TV. Get rid of the kids. Next day, same thing. When I went back to Latin America, it was amazing. Everybody was together—there were so many orators and witty people; dinner would last for four hours. That's what influenced my work.

You joke that you come from "a long line of sick, twisted, dysfunctional relationships." How have you escaped that?

My father didn't give you choices. He didn't ask what you wanted; he told you what he wanted. But I don't want to be like my dad. I don't want to repeat what he did. When I'm not working, I have to be Dad—I have to be taking my kids to school, picking them up, taking them to the bathroom. It's expected. The reversal of roles is wild. But there's a closeness that happens when you do mundane things with your kids. It's like therapy. It's a Zen thing. I don't have to be doing important shit all the time—it's nice to be subservient to your child, up to a point.

Is it strange to see your kids grow up so differently from how you did?

Yeah! They have a country house. I had a public community pool that people peed in. I've been asking my friends—how do we fuck them up a little bit? So that they grow up right. Because you've got to have adversity. You've got to understand that to hit bottom—to fail—is not a bad thing. Kids that don't have adversity—once they hit the wall, they just break. But what can I do—perform some kind of fiendish experiment? Throw them into a ghetto school and say, hey, go fend for yourself?

This is your second marriage—and you make a lot of dark jokes about the first, which ended in divorce. What did you learn?

I don't think people should be married before age 30! You don't know who you are, and your hormones are too crazy. It's hard to take back things that you've said to one another. Once you say something, it's never really gone. You've got an imaginary scoreboard on both sides. It seems like women in their 40s are all leaving their men. I have a lot of guy friends who want to blame the chick—she's the one who left. But I tell them: You're the one who drove her away, brother.

Do you have any insight to help men and women get what they want from each other?

We like to have our egos caressed all the time: "You're a great provider. What a hero you are. You are so amazing in bed." Lie if you have to! Guys will do anything. For men, what's always so hard not to do is to try to solve everything. It's almost impossible. We are so programmed to give advice, to say fix this, do this, do that. You have to just switch yourself off. You know all that when you're first dating. The guy pays more attention. The woman swoons more—makes a big production. You make each other feel great. And then you both start getting tired.

The character you play in Cronicas is morally complex—a self-promoting TV reporter who also wants to catch the bad guy.