John Leguizamo feels family ties in “Nothing Like the Holidays”
John Leguizamo in “Nothing Like the Holidays.”
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.
Friends enhance ’Holidays’
Actor says relationships with co-stars made it easy to portray family
When you’re surrounded by a great cast of friends, portraying a close-knit family gets much easier.
That was John Leguizamo’s experience filming the Christmas dramedy “Nothing Like the Holidays,” featuring Alfred Molina, Vanessa Ferlito, Elizabeth Pena, Freddy Rodriguez and Debra Messing. Leguizamo, 44, had worked with most of his co-stars previously, and two weeks of rehearsals in Chicago helped strengthen their ties.
“By the time we got to film, we were already like a family. I mean, we had breakfast, lunch and dinner together; we partied together. We were like the clingiest, neediest actors I’ve ever seen. It was great,” he said with a laugh during a recent phone interview from New York, where he was raised.
The film centers on a Puerto Rican-American family based in Chicago’s Humboldt Park. The clan’s three adult children gather at their parents’ (Molina and Pena) house for the first family Christmas in three years, and everyone brings along their share of old resentments and new conflicts.
Cast against type, the normally funny and freewheeling Leguizamo plays eldest child Mauricio, an uptight and successful Manhattan attorney still seeking his father’s approval. He and his Jewish wife Sarah (Messing), a high-powered investment banker, are locked in a debate about when to have children, with Mauricio’s domineering mother pressuring them to hurry.
The film focuses on a Latino family but delves into universal issues. The native Columbian was particularly pleased with the low-key, sophisticated handling of the mixed-race relationship between his and Messing’s characters.
“A great movie or a great piece of literature is timeless and it knows no boundaries of ethnic, race or economic status. It transcends all that; I mean, that’s the goal of great writing,” he said.
If convincingly depicting familiar family bond was the easy part, he said maintaining the film’s tone was the tough part.
“Dramedies are like the toughest genre ever ‘cause you go one step left and one step too far right, then it’s not a dramedy anymore. Then it’s like a ridiculous comedy, and if you go too dark, then you’ll never get the humor back,” he said.
The actors also coped with the challenges of wintertime shooting on location in Chicago, where wind chills dipped to 25 degrees below zero. The welcoming Humboldt Park residents reached out to the cast and crew, inviting them into their homes to warm up and dine on Puerto Rican cuisine, including coquito, the Latin version of egg nog made of coconut milk, rum and spices.
“Any time you can be in a real location, it just makes your work so much more authentic since you have to deal with the real people that you’re portraying and the real environment,” he said. “Usually people when you’re doing movies, they want you out of their block, out of their neighborhood, but here they opened their doors.”
-BAM
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Man, every time you talk about this movie, you mention coquito and it sounds delicious. It really makes me want to try it. I guess I’ll have to go find a recipe for it.
Also, I don’t mean to be repeating stereotypes, but I think this sort of movie actually works better with a Latino cast. I think it is because they are known for being both dramatic and extremely warm-hearted. Too many movies like this play the drama or comedy and lose the heart. In this case, the audience is still secure in the fact that they not only love, but like, each other.