Actor John Leguizamo has slammed Hollywood for frequently casting white actors in the role of Latinos, even criticizing one of his best-known movies, Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way (1993), for putting Al Pacino in the title role of a Puerto Rican gangster.
But in his open letter published Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times, Leguizamo omitted any mention of his own movie roles in which he crossed the apparently forbidden Latino-white ethnic divide. The Colombian-born actor played Italian-American characters in the movies Summer of Sam (1999) and Super Mario Bros. (1993).
This is on my mind! Listen up Hollywood and platforms! https://t.co/yDCipUBwZ5
— John Leguizamo (@JohnLeguizamo) November 1, 2022
Leguizamo used his L.A. Times essay to call out a host of other non-Latino Hollywood stars for playing Latino characters on screen. He singled out the casting of John Turturro as Jesus in The Big Lebowski, Marisa Tomei in The Perez Family, Antonio Banderas in El Mariachi, and Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez in Argo.
In Carlito’s Way. Leguizamo played Benny Blanco from the Bronx, an upstart gangster who guns down the protagonist, played by Pacino. “They surrounded him [Pacino] with Latino actors, but not one of us had a lead role. In our own stories, we were still just supporting players,” he wrote.
But Leguizamo himself has taken roles that, by his own reasoning, should have been played be Italian-American actors.
In the 1993 movie adapt Super Mario Bros., Leguizamo played Italian-American plumber Luigi Mario who works alongs his sibling (Bob Hoskins) in their Brooklyn business.
Six years later, Leguizamo was cast in the lead role in Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, playing Vinny, an Italian-American hairdresser whose story gets caught up in the Son of Sam killing spree in New York during the summer of 1977.
The actor even played a Frenchman in Moulin Rouge! in 2001, incarnating renowned French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
In his op-ed, Leguizamo argued that Latino actors are woefully underrepresented not only because they are the country’s largest ethnic minority, but because Latinos were in America before whites.
“We Latinos are 19 percent of the population and the largest ethnic group in America, and we’ve been here long before the conquests of the 1500s. How are we not more visible onscreen and onstage?” he wrote. “If much of the United States was Mexico until the 1840s or later, how are we not more visible?”
He said Hollywood must build a pipeline for Latino talent, but not just any Latino talent.
“I’m not talking about white or white-passing Latinos. I mean Indigenous Latinos. I mean Aztec, Maya, Inca or Taíno. I mean Afro-Latino or any mix thereof. More often than not, the Latinos you see onscreen are white or white-passing — because Hollywood is drenched in colorism,” he wrote.
This isn’t the first time Leguizamo has complained about Hollywood “colorism.” As Breitbart News reported, the actor revealed earlier this year that he used to avoid getting a tan in order to improve his casting opportunities.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.