Q&A John Leguizamo

By Rebecca Winters

In a new remake of the 1976 John Carpenter thriller, Assault on Precinct 13, comedian John Leguizamo plays a small-time criminal with a very big mouth.

Has the quality of roles for Latinos changed much since you started in show business? There's a lot more of them, for one thing. And now we get to play people on the right side of the law.

But in this movie you play a junkie. He's a small-time hood. I thought I could do something funky with this character. I was trying to make him like these homeless drug addicts in my old neighborhood on the Lower East Side, where, you know, they were somebody once.

Do you ever get backlash from friends and family for personal things you divulge in your one-man shows? The hostility those shows created in my family will never go away. We need to go out in the woods with a therapist. At Christmas it's all cordial, and then after a few drinks it comes out: "Why did you say that about Grandma? She didn't deserve that."

Do you ever worry that therapy will end up hurting your comedy? Of course. That's why I stopped going. You've got to be angry at life to be creative.

You were one of Lee Strasberg's acting students. For one day. I did one scene, an emotional memory recall of my dog getting hit by a car, and [Strasberg] said to me, "You're faking it." And I was, kind of. Everybody else in the class was crying and whining. That night the man died.

Strasberg died? Yeah. I have that effect on people.