Left-wing actor John Leguizamo is accusing Hollywood of being just like “Jim Crow” for Latinos as he laments his first big break in movies.
Appearing on the Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade podcast, the wildly anti-Trump actor claimed to be traumatized by his first big break in movies, according to Variety.
One of Leguizamo’s earliest roles was as a Latino gangbanger who shoots Harrison Ford in the head in the 1991 film, Regarding Henry. And Leguizamo blasted Hollywood for having no roles for Latinos outside of portraying criminals.
The leftist actor claimed that “even talking about [the movie] just gives me PTSD.”
Leguizamo, 65, told Carvey and Spade that he took the role because the film was being directed by famed director Mike Nichols, who the actor said is “one of the greats.” But he also took the role because he wasn’t being offered anything else in those days.
“You know, I was kind of humiliated by it,” Leguizamo claimed of the gangbanger role. “I did it because I got no jobs. There were no jobs for Latin folk. There just weren’t.”
Leguizamo, added that Hollywood was like “Jim Crow” for minority roles. He noted that it was sort of like, “white doctor, white lawyer, white husband, white lover, Latino drug dealer.”
“They just want to see great shows, but they just weren’t casting us. When I got Regarding Henry, it was a drug dealer. I shoot this white guy. It was like, I’m perpetuating what they want to see, which is negative Latino images,” he exclaimed.
Spade and Carvey asked Lequazamo if he was ever asked to “Latin it up a little more” by a director, but he replied that it never really happened like that.
“They didn’t have to say that to me as much. I was the flavor they were looking for, like a ghetto hoodrat,” he explained. “I had been working against that. All my acting teachers, when I was 17, they were like, ‘No one can understand you with that accent. Do you really speak that way?””
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