Books
One Nightstand With John Leguizamo
Ahead of The Odyssey and the release of his first children’s book, the actor, playwright, and author discusses the novels and plays that have influenced his career and his parenting philosophy.
In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.
When Christopher Nolan pitched John Leguizamo on his role in The Odyssey, he did it over a candid dinner at The Odeon in Tribeca. “[Nolan] said, ‘This is Eumaeus, he is the most loyal character in Western literature,’” says the 65-year-old Colombian-American actor. “And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds like it’s right up my alley.’"
In a classic Nolan move, however, finer details, like the actual script, remained a mystery until the deal was done. “You get it after you sign the contract, you don’t get it before,” adds Leguizamo. “You have to be home and you have to sign for it, and it has to be you — your assistant can’t pick it up. And it’s in this red color with, like, shiny black ink.”
The shoot itself proved rigorous, with no phones allowed on set. “There’s no diva system,” he says. “So you have to talk to people... make friendships.” Leguizamo relished the opportunity, given his approach to the work. “I’m a method actor and I don’t believe you can fake relationships,” he says. As the steward of Odysseus’ land and family, Leguizamo worked to form relationships with both Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, and Tom Holland, who plays his son, Telemachus. ”I played Padel with Tom,” he says. “That was so fun.”
Leguizamo has himself been leaving it all in front of the camera for nearly four decades, turning out career-defining performances across Hollywood and Broadway, working with auteurs like Baz Luhrmann, Spike Lee, Tony Scott, and Brian De Palma while voicing animated icons like Sid the Sloth in Ice Age and Bruno in Encanto. His one-man show Freak won him a Primetime Emmy in 1999, making him the first Latino actor to win in that category; Latin History for Morons earned a Tony nomination for Best Play in 2018, the same year he received a Special Tony for three decades of bringing diverse stories to Broadway. It’s a legacy he hopes to continue advancing. “We’re 20% of the US population, but we’re 30% of the US box office... with less than 6% of the roles, leading roles and less than 1% of the executives,” he says of Latino representation in Hollywood.
Leguizamo has seemingly boundless energy for this work, such that he’s adding children’s author to the list of his jobs, too. “I have always been a big reader, but my reading tastes have changed a lot,” he says of his habits. “I was a little guy, I was kind of ADHD so I couldn’t really read long form, but I could read a ton of short form, like encyclopedias and all kinds of informative books. I think fiction really hit me when I was a little older.”
He’s releasing his first children’s book, Kiki and the Can, in August. “It’s about a little kid who goes to the park to hang out with his friends like I used to when I was a kid. And all his friends are bragging about their heroes, and he doesn’t have any heroes. So he runs home all sad, and his mom tells him, ‘Look, what are you talking about? We have tons of Latin heroes.’ And so he starts reading the mom’s books, and he goes back to his friends and he spray cans, spray paints all his heroes back into history.”
Keep reading to discover four of Leguizamo’s own favorite books.
Leguizamo’s first selection is Open Veins of Latin America, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 chronicle of five centuries of exploitation in the region. “He traveled all over Latin America, and that’s where he came with this point of view of what happened,” he says. “So he gives you a perspective of our empires before the conquest and then the ruination of Latin culture.”
The work, which went on to inspire his one-man show and Netflix special John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons, struck an emotional chord. “You go through the five stages of grief with this book,” he says. “You get rage, you get depressed, you start to feel overlooked, and then eventually you come to terms with it.”
Galeano’s depiction of the vibrancy of pre-colonization Latin American life is also personal. On an episode of PBS’s Finding Your Roots, Leguizamo learned his ancestry in the Americas stretches back more than 500 years on both sides. “I had conquistadors and indigenous people and African slaves as well in the whole lineage, so it was really powerful to me,” he says. “I said to myself, ’I’m not going to cry. This is ridiculous.’ And then he [Henry Louis Gates, Jr.] told me about my 12th grandfather who was indigenous and was written about as a ’noble Indian.’ And that made me weep.”
His next pick, Eugene O’Neill’s four-act Long Day’s Journey Into Night, was published posthumously in 1956 and is widely considered the playwright’s magnum opus. The semi-autobiographical drama depicts his father’s financial anxieties, his mother’s addiction, his brother’s alcoholism, and his own tuberculosis. “It’s such a powerful piece. I think it influenced me completely in my whole life,” he says. “I don’t think I would’ve written what I wrote in Freak without Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
The play also shaped the kind of father he wants to be. “I’m in show business, and you see what goes on and you try to analyze, and I think a lot of the problems are absence or letting the lifestyle overtake your parenting,” he says. “I’m a person who loves experts. I’ve been in therapy all my life, and so we did parenting therapy.”
He continues: “I had to make rules with my wife and myself that [we spend] no more than two weeks apart. I started turning down movies because I had to be home, because you can’t replace being home — and I don’t regret it because I was home and I got to play sports with them. I got to impart my philosophies, because if you’re not there, who’s going to impart them?”
His third choice is 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. The twisty genre-bending novel follows the titular Oscar, an overweight Dominican-American sci-fi nerd, as he navigates a generational curse. “The book was just incredible. I mean, first of all, I didn’t know enough about Dominican history and what happened with Trujillo — who was an autocrat and a dictator — and the killings,” he says. “He made it so accessible about this kid just going to college who wants to get laid and he’s also giving you the whole history of the Dominican Republic. I read it before I did Latin History for Morons and I think subconsciously it definitely influenced me.”
The book also grapples with what it means to be a man — a reckoning Leguizamo had at Machu Picchu. “I realized that being a man is not fighting all the time or never having to say you’re sorry. A man can say ’I’m sorry’ and can walk away from a fight and can take the higher road,” he says. “That was a big flip for me, because I grew up on the street, and you always had to throw the first punch. You never could walk away from a fight. Loyalty was a big deal. So that’s the way I grew up and I had to undo all that, and I was trying to do it for my son… I didn’t want him to continue the cycle of violence with the bullies.”
He carried that realization into voicing Bruno, the ostracized uncle in Disney’s Encanto. “We just improvised a lot to try to get that neurotic, beautiful, vulnerable sigma male, another type of masculinity, which is much softer, not alpha,” he says. “I was really happy about that also because it’s a Latin story and puts a different type of Latin masculinity in the forefront.”
His final selection is the works of James Joyce, one of Leguizamo’s favorite writers and an enduring source of inspiration for his own work. “I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a young man in high school and I think that might have helped me decide what I wanted to be,” he says.
When preparing for The Odyssey, Leguizamo returned to Joyce’s 1922 modernist retelling, Ulysses. “[Joyce] became the greatest writer in the history of Western literature because Ulysses is not only a masterpiece, but it’s a work of modern art,” he says. “It captures the way we think and speak, but it’s even more because it is the subconscious. It is your inner monologue and then what you choose to say.”
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