John Leguizamo’s America – Metro Weekly

Sometimes, a book or movie or play speaks so directly to the zeitgeist, it’s as if the artists are responding in real-time to a conversation we’re all having. That’s the case with John Leguizamo’s The Other Americans, currently in its world-premiere run at Arena Stage. In the aftermath of the presidential election, amid feverish appraisals of Latino voters’ support for Trump, this modern-day tragedy about a Queens Latino family fraying at the edges arrives at a moment of perfect relevance.

Offering insight into the struggles of son-of-an-immigrant laundromat owner Nelson Castro — portrayed by Leguizamo, whose own family immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia when he was three — the play also tackles everything from mental health to housing discrimination.

The ensemble drama reveals biting truths about the pressures that might lead a family man to act against his own best interests. Leguizamo, who has written and performed several solo shows on and off Broadway, and received a special Tony Award in 2018 for his body of work, says that, although the play is set in the ’90s and was inspired by an anti-Latino hate crime incident from that decade, the issues at hand in The Other Americans are always relevant.

“The Latin predicament is not new,” says Leguizamo, over a Zoom call one week after the election. “We’ve been deported two times in America. Two million people were deported in 1930 with the Repatriation Act. Most of them were American citizens who had never been to Mexico, weren’t born there. They were born here and were deported, and all their land wealth was taken, their positions of power, their possessions, everything was confiscated. And then again, in the 1950s with the Wetback Act, which is a horrible name, but they deported another million people, most of them American citizens, again, and all Latino.”

An astute advocate for his community and causes, as well as his art, Leguizamo also created and hosts, on PBS, American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos. Whereas he’s spent much of his four-decade career in film and television and onstage aiming for laughs, the artist appears these days to be on a passionate mission to educate, too. And not a moment too soon for this country.

But he doesn’t intend to spoon-feed the facts or present simple answers. “That’s what this is about, understanding and not making it easy,” he says. “I don’t want to make it easy for the audience. I don’t want to make it just a race play. I wanted to make it really, really complex, really difficult to digest, make the morality really, really murky, because that’s how we experience life. I’ve never experienced life in black and white, this is good and that’s bad. It’s all in the gray zone, and that’s how I want to create my realities on stage.”

METRO WEEKLY: Congratulations on the play. I saw it and really enjoyed it. Are you having a good time?

JOHN LEGUIZAMO: Well, it’s kind of a tricky situation saying a good time about a tragedy. I am having an amazing time with my cast, and to execute my vision is thrilling as heck. The play is, I’m not going to lie, it beats the hell out of me and my cast. We do a lot of hugging in between, and before and after, just to survive it, because it is a tragedy. It’s a Greek tragedy in modern terms. So you have to put yourself through the wringer to get those emotions, to serve the plot and the characters. You have to go as deep and dark as you can. I guess it’s a masochistic kind of thrill, to see how much hurt you can put your body through and your emotions and your soul.

MW: I understand. “Good time” was maybe a misnomer.

LEGUIZAMO: That’s going to be the name of my next production company — Misnomer. I like that. [Laughs.]

MW: You’ve obviously written and performed a lot solo on stage. Have you written for an ensemble cast before?

LEGUIZAMO: I’ve written screenplays before, yeah. I wrote Undefeated for HBO. I wrote Kiss My Aztec!, a musical. And this is my first tragedy. I’ve never written a tragedy before. I guess it’s my first straight play with a full cast.

MW: I’ve seen you on stage solo. I feel like that’s got to be one of the hardest things in the business, to hold a stage all by yourself.

LEGUIZAMO: [Nodding.] Whoo!

MW: How different is the challenge of being in a straight play where you’re not the only person up there?

LEGUIZAMO: Well, doing a one-man show, oh, dude, let me tell you. It’s like a marathon Olympics run. You see those guys win, but yo, they look like they’re about to die. It’s a victory, but it’s like you’re near death — the amount of effort, energy, and psychic willpower you have to have.

And then it’s lonely because you’re alone. But here, I have camaraderie, I have community, I have a support group. The challenges here are making sure every character is very different, making sure every character has a really interesting arc, and that the piece pays off. The piece has to pay off. Obviously, it has to pay off to satisfy me as an artist, but I want to satisfy the audience as well.

MW: Pay off is a good term for my next question, because I saw the show a few days before the election, and it had a powerful effect. Then I was working on a review the day after the election, and it paid off in a different way, because the conversation that day was so much, among other things, about how could Latino voters support this party that seems to disrespect their community all the time? And here’s a play about a Latino patriarch who’s contemplating selling out his family to maintain status. I felt differently about the play after the election and this conversation was happening. Did you feel any differently going into the election, and after, about the story that you’re telling?

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah. Obviously, the Latin situation has been incredibly difficult in America for the last 500 years, since 1492, because the first European language spoken in America was Spanish, not English. And we owned everything. Florida. Everything from the Mississippi to the West Coast. So it’s been difficult being a Latin person. We were the first to fight against segregation, in 1914, in Denver, Colorado. Then the first to fight it in California in 1940, Sylvia Mendez paving the way for Brown v. Board of Education. We were segregated, we were lynched, we were burned alive, we were shot, we were massacred alongside our Black brothers and sisters. It was more severe for my Black brothers and sisters, but we were a close second.

It’s always been a difficult situation being Latin in America, a Latino. So you have to sometimes make choices that are difficult, especially if you believe the American dream is for everybody, and you believe it hook, line, and sinker, then you start betraying yourself, and you start betraying those that you love to get there, to get that taste of success, to get some of that. To get a hold of that brass ring, you might betray yourself and those that you love.

I’ve seen lots of Latin people do that. Because we’re very smart, we’re very entrepreneurial, and venture capitalists don’t come to us, less than one percent. Bank loans don’t come to us, yet Latin women are the number-one small business creators in America, which is the big driver of our economy. We’re at the bottom of the food chain in terms of economics. We’re in a precarious place, where moral decisions sometimes are very complex. It’s not all black and white. It’s not a fairy tale where you do the right thing and everything pays off. No.

So yeah, a lot of Latinos believed his lies. Trump’s lies are big and people believe them. I don’t think Latinos knew that they were betraying themselves as much. I know some immigrants feel like they deserve more than the new immigrants coming, and I’m talking about Latinos mostly. I’m sure other groups feel the same way. And yeah, I think my play has a different resonance, especially now that Trump is president and he’s going to try to deport 10 to 20 million immigrants. When we say immigrant, we know the euphemism is Latinos, and my Haitian brothers and sisters, because they’re Latino as well.

And now, they’re going to deport the children that are American citizens, and the spouses? It’s going to turn into a horrific mess of a Third Reich. How do you do that? How do you incarcerate these people? How do you lock down 20 million people or more? There are only 10 million undocumented. They have the numbers. So my play has a different resonance. A sadder resonance.

MW: So to talk about your castmates, I thought that you and Luna Lauren Velez had really believable chemistry as a longtime married couple. Had you worked previously together?

LEGUIZAMO: No, Luna and I had not, but I knew I wanted her to be the lead. First of all, there’s so much great Latin talent out there that does not get used. And I’ve seen so much great talent go wasted over the years, sadly. And right now, there’s a plethora of Latin talent just on the bench, waiting to be called on.

There was a huge amount of great Latin actresses, but Luna, her grace on stage, her emotional depth, her acting skills are just top-notch. The Latina Meryl Streep, if I may. Working with her is such a joy, man. It’s just a thrill. I feel safe in her hands. I feel I can be as roguish as I can, and still know that she just grounds the whole thing, the whole piece. She’s the centerpiece.

MW: How would you characterize what we’re seeing in their relationship?

LEGUIZAMO: Well, from personal experience, from all my friends and near friends, dear friends, yo, marriage is rough. You just got to hang in there. It’s got great rewards, amazing rewards you can’t even think of, but it’s work. You have to work on it. There’s ups and downs. It’s no fairy tale romance, but it’s beautiful and you’ve got to hang on. Yeah, that’s a marriage, full of tensions, breaking of trust, and you have to build trust again. Fights. Things are said that are hard to take back. Yeah, that all happens. I tried to make it as real a relationship, and I think at my age, I should be able to understand. I have enough experience to know what a real marriage feels and sounds like.

MW: Another thing I got from the marriage, but also from just Nelson, he reminds me a little bit of George Jefferson. Pop culture-wise, they’re both clean-clothes entrepreneurs from Queens, they like to dance with their wives.

LEGUIZAMO: Wait, wait, wait. Did he have a laundromat? Did he have a laundromat?

MW: Dry cleaners. He was a dry cleaner.

LEGUIZAMO: [Laughs.] Oh, shit. Oh, man. So he was a little more upscale.

MW: So, if not George Jefferson, was there any inspiration for Nelson?

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah. My uncles, my cousins, my dad. Latin people are mad entrepreneurial. They got laundromats, they got restaurants. Every friend of my mom’s had a business idea. Travel agency, real estate agency, sometimes all of them in one store. You know how that kind of hustle goes, that kind of grind. So yeah, I based it on a lot of Latin men that I knew that had so many dreams, so smart, and yet, the glass ceiling is a real thing for Latin people. Look at Rita Moreno in the ’50s. Any white person that would have won what she won back then would have been the lead of every movie, every play. And you never saw her hardly ever again.

So that’s a real plight. You could be mad skillful as a Latin person. You can have mad Latin excellence. It’s so hard for us to get to the next level. It’s virtually impossible. We’re twenty percent of the U.S. population — you would never know that from the media, from the corporate boards. You just wouldn’t know that because we’re kept down.

I hear from a lot of Latin executives who tell me, “Yo, I’m good enough to train somebody that gets promoted over me, but I’m not good enough to be promoted.” I hear that all the time. So that’s why Nelson is that. He’s those demographics. He’s those stats of Latin men with incredible ambition, incredible drive, incredible brilliance that can’t catch a break, can’t get the loan from the banks because of their last names or their skin color, their features, whatever they’re using as a metric to deny you your opportunities.

MW: In addition to my appreciation of your work, I think a lot of people I know really appreciate your work. My mother, for example, is very excited I’m talking to you.

LEGUIZAMO: Aw. Send her a big hug for me.

MW: She wanted me to tell you that she’s been watching American Historia, and she DVR’d it because she’s looking forward to watching it with me at Thanksgiving because I haven’t seen it. Writing and creating that show, what did you learn that you might not have known already? I guess there were lots of facts that you might not have known, but what did you gain from it?

LEGUIZAMO: Well, I wrote the outline for the whole series. So I had the information. There were a few things that I learned. I didn’t know that we built the whole railroad in the 1800s. So after 1830s, ’40s, our Asian brothers and sisters were kicked out. So we took over and finished the whole infrastructure of the Southwest and the West and the railroad all the way to the West. That, I didn’t know.

I didn’t know that Batman was based on a Latin vigilante [Joaquín Murrieta] from the 1800s whose parents were killed. And he wore a mask and he hid, and he fought back for his people, 1840s, after the U.S. invaded what was then Mexico, and it became Arizona, Texas, and California. So that was interesting to me. There’s a lot of great little facts that boggled my mind.

Like Dracula. There were no vampire bats. Vampire bats only exist in Mexico and Central America, in the Americas. And the Mayans and the Aztecs had a half-human, half-vampire, blood-sucking god, Camazots. So Bram Stoker “borrowed” — appropriated — our culture to make it a big hit. Those little tidbits to me are really exciting.

MW: You’re also on the board of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino, which was established a few years ago, but we’re not going to see a building for a decade, which seems like a long time. Why do you think it’s taking so long?

LEGUIZAMO: It always takes a long, long time. There’s also a lot of pushback, obviously. Republicans and Democrats were able to pass it through the House and the Senate, so that was incredible, but the location is where we’re having the difficulty. We want to be on the Mall. We want to be across the street from the African-American Museum, that beautiful, gorgeous building. The lot is smaller, so we have to be deeper and taller to get all our history in it, but that’s where you want to be. We don’t want to be miles and miles away, because now, again, we’re second-class citizens, relegated to being underprivileged again.

So that’s what we’re fighting for, is a place on the Mall. And we got some people fighting against us going, “Why do you need to do that?” So that’s what we’re fighting. But I think my PBS series, American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos, I think is going to help, when you see all that. And then hopefully, we get a season two and three, where I can go more granular. That’s what I’m hoping for, and to keep fighting for the museum. I think raising the money’s not going to be hard, $800 million, but I think what’s going to be difficult is to keep fighting for a place. We need [Senator Chuck] Schumer to jump in. We had a lot of help from [Senators] Lisa Murkowski and Amy Klobuchar. We’ve had their help. We’re going to fight. We’ll keep fighting. We’re not giving up.

MW: What about Latinos and Latinas in Congress? Is there anybody prominent among them who is helping with the museum?

LEGUIZAMO: Oh, yeah. Nanette Barragán, Tony Cárdenas is all up it. Pete Aguilar, Nydia Velázquez, Veronica Escobar. Obviously, we don’t have the huge numbers that we should have in Congress and the Senate, being that we’re the majority in Texas, almost the majority in Arizona, equal to whites in New York City, largest ethnic group in California. We should have massive numbers, but we know what the situation is. We’ll get there. We’ll get there.

MW: So a couple of New York questions. Do you vote in New York? Is Eric Adams your mayor, and are you concerned about the state of his administration?

LEGUIZAMO: I try not to think about it because I got enough to deal with this presidency and try to get over that. I’m in a tragedy, and I’m living a tragedy. I just have no escape. So yeah, Eric Adams is unfortunate. Yeah, it’s a travesty. I think we, New York, have to lead by example to the rest of the country, being that we’re one of the most successful states in the country in terms of economics and intellectual power. So yeah, we need a mayor who represents us with the high moral standard that we look at ourselves as.

MW: Have you ever considered running for office?

LEGUIZAMO: No, no, no.

MW: Or has anybody ever come to you with that?

LEGUIZAMO: Never. No. I love what I do too much. To stop being an artist, no, I can’t give that up. That’s my bliss. That’s my special superpower. I’m not giving that up, but I love supporting people. I love supporting AOC. I love supporting Kamala and Obama and Hillary. I love supporting. I feel like these people don’t get enough credit for sacrificing and being of service. Everybody thinks it’s just power grabs and greed. Yo, it’s an exhausting, difficult place where you put your life in danger too. People don’t understand. They don’t understand that politicians are really doing us a service. Obviously, there’s one or two bad apples. We just have to extricate those.

MW: The politicians themselves sometimes make it hard to distinguish the ones who are really in it for the service, but there are plenty who are.

LEGUIZAMO: Oh, yes. That’s the thing. Everybody throws the whole barrel away because of one or two bad apples, but that’s not hot.

MW: I’ve also seen that you support, not just politicians but causes. I’m going to ask about your strong support for LGBTQ causes, and specifically, your support for trans youth, which is meaningful to me because I have somebody really close in my life who’s a young trans person. They need all the support they can get at this moment in this world. Primarily, what motivates your support for that?

LEGUIZAMO: Well, I feel like as a person of privilege and success and fame, I have to use my platform to help the most vulnerable in the world, the most vulnerable in our country, the most vulnerable in our communities. Transgender youth are very vulnerable, and especially with all this new talk and all this new hate speech just makes it even more difficult. Their lives are already difficult enough. Why make them more difficult? Why not nurture them and protect them? I have a lot of people in my life that are transgender, and they’re incredible, beautiful, gifted people, and we have to do all we can to help them out, to protect them.

MW: I appreciate that. So one thing I didn’t ask about the play, are there plans to take it elsewhere, specifically to Broadway?

LEGUIZAMO: I’m not at a place yet to reveal that. But I’m having lots of great talks and conversations. There’s lots of interest, and I love it, and they’re courting me, and yeah, I’ll make some decisions.

MW: Okay, good. I would hope that New Yorkers get to see the show because it’s a New York show. There’s a lot of New York stuff.

LEGUIZAMO: The Mets jokes, the Astoria jokes, all the New York accents, all the New York language and lingo. Yeah, they get it. They get it.

MW: I was going to ask you about this because it’s just really funny. As I was preparing for this the other day, I was flipping through channels and boom, switched onto your face, it was What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, which I hadn’t seen. Are you ever surprised by which movies pop up like that, and which ones don’t catch on the same way?

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, like Infiltrator, I did that, what, ten years ago, I think? Something like that. And now, it was Top 10 on Netflix for a week. And people hitting me up all over the place like it just came out, and that’s wild. I’m like, “Alan Alda wants to do a whole podcast with me about a retrospective on my life because he loved Infiltrator?” And he was saying, “Your acting is always so surgically beautiful.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll come on your show.” Things like that. Me and Bryan Cranston are texting, “Oh, shit. Can you believe our flick was top 10? Whoo!”

MW: Now I’ve got to go check out The Infiltrator.

LEGUIZAMO: Oh, you’ll dig it. You’ll dig it. I think Brad Furman is an incredible American director. He’s a friend of mine, and so I’m happy for his success.

MW: I think I just read on your IMDB, aren’t you doing something else with Brad Furman?

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tin Soldier with Jamie Foxx and De Niro.

MW: Yeah. Well, about What’s The Worst That Could Happen?, I was curious because that cast was a killer cast.

LEGUIZAMO: Bananas. Bananas.

MW: What do you remember about making that movie?

LEGUIZAMO: Wow. I had an amazing time with Bernie Mac. Rest in Peace. Beautiful man. So fun. So great, so gracious. Danny DeVito was amazing. I mean, it was an amazing cast. We had so much fun. It didn’t do so well. [Laughs.] I’m not sure if it holds up. I haven’t seen it since, so I don’t know.

MW: I will tell you that the scene I flipped on to was right before you and Martin Lawrence are doing the Arab prince scene.

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, I don’t know how that holds up now. I thought it was hilarious then. Now, I don’t know how appropriate that is to be making fun like that. I love my Arab brothers and sisters, so I mean no disrespect.

MW: Yeah, I’m not getting you in trouble. It was on TV. And so another, I guess, “do you remember” question, because I worked for Spike Lee’s production company 40 Acres for a long time.

LEGUIZAMO: Oh, my God.

MW: So I’m going to ask you, what do you remember about making Summer of Sam? Because that was a lot of fun for us.

LEGUIZAMO: Dude, it was one of the great highlights of my life working on that flick. First of all, the script by Michael Imperioli and Victor Colicchio was phenomenal. Working with Spike! He’s an actor’s director. The freedom he gave me, and I learned so much about myself as an actor, as an artist. He let me go as far out as possible, and he gave me the room and the safety for me to feel like I could go nuts and insane and still be safe, and it was incredible. Working with Mira Sorvino, Adrien Brody at the top of his game. He’s so beautiful to watch in this movie. I don’t know, I think it’s one of Spike’s best movies. Used to call it his white exploitation movie. He tried to help me pass for white, and he did the best he could. It was incredible. I stayed out of the sun forever. [Laughs.] Certain features betray me, but whatever.

MW: Fun fact, I have a piece of your wardrobe from that movie. From the wardrobe sale.

LEGUIZAMO: Oh, no way. What you got?

MW: The black tank top. Do you remember the black tank top?

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, of course, I do.

MW: They had three or four of them for sale. I still have one.

LEGUIZAMO: That’s cool. That’s so cool. It’s a beautiful movie. We went to Cannes — my first time at Cannes Film Festival. Oh, and Spike is so generous, man. Took us all with him. Oh, it was incredible.

MW: All right, so this is not a movie question, but sort of a movie question. They opened a To Wong Foo musical last year in the U.K., and they’re supposedly bringing it to New York. I don’t know where it is. Have you seen it? Do you want to see it?

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, I do.

MW: You ready for the next Chi Chi?

LEGUIZAMO: I want to see how many of my lines they kept. Cause I made up a lot of my dialogue in that movie. Douglas Carter Beane wrote an amazing screenplay and the great character, but I really improvised and embellished my role. Because here I was with some superstars. Wesley Snipes. Patrick Swayze, RIP again. I was like, “This is my chance to blow myself up,” and I did. I had an incredible coach, Laritza Dumont, Puerto Rican, transgender angel, who, I borrowed a lot of her lines, a lot of her behavior. She had that New York accent like [Chi Chi’s]. She talked like that. She had that thing going on that I love so much.

MW: Can you imagine a studio making that movie today?

LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, I can, just not with straight actors. It wouldn’t be fair. We’re in a new world. I get a lot of pushback from a lot of my actor friends going, “Oh, why can’t every actor play everything?” Because that’s not how it works. It was only white males who got to play everything. It wasn’t like we all got to play everything. So why not let LGTBQ people own their own stories and be in their own stories? Why do we have to appropriate their culture as well?

MW: At least for a moment.

LEGUIZAMO: Right? At least for now. I know that now everybody’s like, “Oh, let’s run away from identity politics because Kamala lost.” No, don’t abandon your principles, fool.

MW: Well, of course the counter to that is that their politics is identity politics, too.

LEGUIZAMO: Right, right. But don’t abandon your principles just because you lost this one fight. Improve your tactics and your policies.

MW: A lot of the talk this week is about the “toxic brand,” or the Democratic brand suffering. What do you think is the state of the Democrats moving forward after this painful loss?

LEGUIZAMO: Very painful loss. Extremely dangerous loss. But you can’t give up. Look, us Latin people have been here for 500 years living under crazy oppression. This ain’t shit. You’re going to let this knock us down? Come on. We’ve been through worse, so much worse. Detention camps, lynching, segregation, redlining, experimented on, sterilized. This is going to defeat us? No way. No way. Now we just regroup, recalibrate, and come back better and stronger.

That’s what you got to do. And we got a lot of wins. Look, about 45 Latinos are in seats of power, more than ever. Gallego just beat Kari Lake in Arizona. Huge. Even though Trump got Arizona, we got a huge win there. The first Black mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the first time two Black women are going to be in the Senate [Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks and Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester]. We got some victories that we’ve got to celebrate. There’s lots to celebrate.

Yeah, the presidency is the brass ring. We want that, too. Let’s see if they can keep the House and the Senate in midterms. I don’t think so. Once their policies start to hit and start hurting people, where it hurts in their pocketbooks, we’ll see. That’s where we’ll come back, in the midterms.

The Other Americans runs through Nov. 24 at Arena Stage, 1101 6th St. SW. Tickets are $59 to $99. Call 202-488-3300, or visit www.arenastage.org.

Follow John Leguizamo on X at @johnleguizamo.