John Leguizamo

Biography

His Broadway debut came in 1998, in a show he had written himself and performed alone: “Freak”. The semi-autobiographical monologue was filmed for HBO, with Spike Lee as director. For it Leguizamo won an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program, and a Drama Desk Award as well.

He was born in Bogotá on 22 July, but the year is given variously as 1960 or 1964, and 1965 also turns up. His parents, Luz Marina Peláez and Alberto Rudolfo Leguizamo, took him to New York when he was three or four. The family moved often between apartments in Queens, including Jackson Heights, and the boy changed elementary schools several times. Later he said that he was one of the first Latino children in the neighborhood, that he got into fights and learned to be funny so that he would not be hit. His parents divorced when he was thirteen, and he lived with his mother. As a teenager he was arrested twice, once for jumping a subway turnstile and once for truancy. Afterwards he was sent for a year to relatives in Colombia.

At Murry Bergtraum High School he wrote comic routines and tried them out on classmates, who voted him “Most Talkative”. After school he entered the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University but left to pursue stand-up. He later studied at LIU Post and at HB Studio.

From 1984 he performed in New York nightclubs. That year he also appears in Madonna’s “Borderline” video as a friend of her character’s boyfriend, and in 1986 he had a small part in “Miami Vice”. In 1988 he appeared on the stage of The Public Theater, playing, among other parts, Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. His first sizeable film role came in “Casualties of War” (1989), in which he played Private First Class Díaz. In 1991 he wrote and performed, in the Off-Broadway show “Mambo Mouth”, seven different characters; it won an Obie Award.

In 1993 he played Luigi in “Super Mario Bros.”. The film failed with critics and at the box office but is generally considered his breakthrough. The same year came Brian De Palma’s “Carlito’s Way”, in which he played Benny Blanco from the Bronx, the enemy of Al Pacino’s hero. Then too he wrote and performed the one-man show “Spic-O-Rama”, which mocked stereotypes of Latinos in the United States; it won a Drama Desk Award. “Mambo Mouth” and “Spic-O-Rama” were later filmed for HBO. In 1995 he created, produced and wrote the Latino-oriented variety show “House of Buggin’” for the Fox network, but because of low ratings it was cancelled in less than a season. In “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar” (1995) he played the drag queen Chi-Chi Rodriguez and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Next came Tybalt in “Romeo + Juliet” (1996), Violator in “Spawn” (1997), Vinny in Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” (1999) and a role in “Moulin Rouge!” (2001).

Since 2002 he has voiced Sid the Sloth in every part of “Ice Age”. In 2002 he also wrote and performed the show “Sexaholix”, and in 2005–2006 he played Dr. Victor Clemente in the TV series “ER”. In 2006 his memoir, “Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends: My Life”, appeared. He turned it into the stage show “Ghetto Klown”, which ran on Broadway in 2011 and brought him a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. In 2014 he played the line cook Martin in “Chef” (for the part he worked in the kitchen of a real restaurant in the West Village) and Aurelio in “John Wick”.

In 2017 “Latin History for Morons”, about the part Latin Americans have played in US history, opened at The Public Theater and then on Broadway. In 2018 it brought him a Tony nomination, and he also received a Special Tony Award for his body of theatre work and for bringing diverse stories to Broadway. In 2018–2019 he appeared in the miniseries “Waco” and “When They See Us” (both roles earned Emmy nominations). In 2020 came his directorial debut, “Critical Thinking”, about a school chess team, and in 2021 he voiced Bruno Madrigal in “Encanto”. In 2023 he briefly hosted “The Daily Show” as one of its rotating guest hosts, and fronted the MSNBC series “Leguizamo Does America”; in 2024 he hosted the PBS series “American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos”.

To my mind, the form itself is the most interesting thing about him: almost every one of his monologues begins as a family yarn and turns out to be a dissection of other people’s ideas about Latinos. In 2022 he performed “Ghetto Klown” for young inmates at the Rikers Island jail.