Exclusive Interview: John Leguizamo on Working a Bloody Double Shift as Identical Twins in The Ministers (Part 1)

Share on Facebook posted 10-13-09 by John Freeman Gill

For an actor, taking a starring film role is always something between a leap of faith and a gamble, a gamble that the director will be able to execute his own vision, a gamble that the actor will see eye to eye with his co-star. In the case of The Ministers, the bloody urban thriller that premieres tonight in New York, John Leguizamo has doubled down on his bet, and can only look his co-star in the eye if he happens to have a mirror. That’s because Johnny Legs, as his friends call him, plays both lead roles in the film, twin brothers from the South Bronx with the rather loaded names Dante and Perfecto Mendoza.

For Leguizamo, an actor’s actor who played seven diverse characters in his 1991 Off Broadway one-man show Mambo Mouth, his dual roles in The Ministers offer the potential for either double glory or double jeopardy. “When someone’s playing twins,” he explains succinctly, “it’s either gonna be twice as good or twice as bad.”

The identities of the twin brothers in The Ministers are forged in very different ways in the Infernoesque South Bronx of the 1970s, when they see their parents die in an arsonist’s blaze. The movie, a story of religion-fueled vigilantism, follows the intertwining stories of the brothers and a Latina detective (Florencia Lozano), who becomes romantically involved with one of them while on the hunt for her own father’s killer. Adding a bit of Mean Streets gravitas is Harvey Keitel, as a veteran cop who gives the young detective advice.

In our exclusive multi-part interview, Johnny Legs tells 30 Ninjas Editor John Freeman Gill how writer-director Franc Reyes crafted the illusion of two brothers with only one actor, how Jeremy Irons’ double duty in the 1991 twins movie Dead Ringers provided inspiration, and why Keitel has still got it after all these years.

Twin Shooters

30 NINJAS: Franc Reyes said it was your idea to make the two brothers, Dante and Perfecto Mendoza, identical twins, with both parts performed by you. Tell me how that developed.

JOHN LEGUIZAMO: Isn’t it always an actor’s idea, the ultimate narcissism? (laughs) The script was written for two brothers, and I just thought that making them twins would add so much more tension and so much more gravitas to what he was doing. Because he’s a fascinating individual, Franc, and he always writes these fantastic stories about his growing up [in the South Bronx] and then he takes them to more operatic kind of storytelling. Twin brothers — it doesn’t always work out; I’ve seen it fail more than it succeeds — but I thought in this situation if we did it right, it could be incredible. And I think Franc did his due diligence and really studied the situation of how to make the illusion of two people with one person. It’s incredibly believable when you see it on film.

30 NINJAS: You’re no stranger to playing multiple characters. But playing identical twins must really require a far finer sense of nuance than any other two characters you might play. The trick, I would think, would be how to make them the same yet different. How did you go about differentiating them, physically and otherwise?

JL: You want to make sure you do it sophisticatedly enough so it’s incredibly believable so the audience isn’t lost, and at the same time you believe that two identical twins can be different or the same played by the same actor. So we had to work really hard to figure out what was subtle and what wasn’t and extract all the unsubtleties.

30 NINJAS: Did you find that you were doing that? That you were starting out with sort of a crude differentiation, and then you were able to make it more subtle over time?

JL: It was actually the opposite. I started out with them too completely similar, and I was going, How am I gonna make this any more different because they’re just way too similar. Because I wanted to start really subtly, to make sure I wasn’t reaching for any, you know, really corny separation, like one with blond hair and one with black hair, like in the ’60s.

Stop Copying Me. No, You Stop Copying Me!

30 NINJAS: So what were some of the nuances, however you might have done it, whether it was physically, or through voice? How did you differentiate the two characters?

JL: Well, eventually we figured out that one brother was definitely much more of a player. He was the one who was more social of the two of them, the guy who would always ask for ice cream when they were kids, and the other guy was always the more impulsive but shy guy, the schemer of the two of them. He was always the guy who drove them to do things that probably got them into trouble, and he would probably would’ve gotten into trouble if they found him out, but the other brother would facilitate it. So that’s kind of how we conceived it, and then eventually we conceived that one of the brothers had some chemical issues, some neurological damage or chemical issues. He’s stuck. He’s kind of a damaged dude.

30 NINJAS: It’s interesting that you talk about it chemically, because it could also simply be that, as you even see in the trailer, the two characters suffered an incredibly traumatic event as children, seeing their parents die in a fire set by an arsonist, and some people get more damaged by such events than others do.

JL: Exactly. One person can experience the same damaging trauma, but can turn that into a positive and something that makes him move forward, and another person can be paralyzed by it and want to destroy other people’s lives.

30 NINJAS: Do these twins start out as similar and then drift apart as the story unfolds?

JL: Yeah, as kids you see them a lot more similar than dissimilar. But when I step in they’re already pretty much apart; they’re pretty much two very different brothers, approaching life in two very different ways. See, the [more social] brother wants to separate, wants to run away. He knows something is up, and he wants to move away from him, but you know, it’s hard. And that’s what I love about making them twins was, how do you move away from a brother who’s a twin?

Double Jeopardy

30 NINJAS: In preparing for these roles, did you look at other films in which one actor plays two roles, or specifically twins?

JL: Yeah, I spent a lot of time online trying to research, at all these twin Web sites, what it feels like to be separated from a twin — people who grew up separately, and they were twins, and had very similar parallel lives even though they lived in different places. And I did look at different movies, I looked at a ton of twin movies, like Twin Falls Idaho. The only one that really worked for me was Jeremy Irons.

30 NINJAS: Dead Ringers! [The 1988 David Cronenberg film about brilliant and increasingly deranged twin gynecologist brothers.] That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about, and I was wondering if you’d think my comparing the two films was out of left field. I actually watched that movie again last night, because it seemed like — it’s a very different movie, obviously, and a very different milieu — but Irons is playing these two freakily close identical twins, with one of them, in particular, becoming increasingly unhinged.

JL: Right.

30 NINJAS: And it also has, as The Ministers appears to, a woman who threatens to make the twins grow apart, which is sort of driving that mental unhinging. Was there anything to be learned from Jeremy Irons’ performances?

JL: Yeah, the way Jeremy handled it: He just didn’t try to do anything over the top. He just handled it as if he was playing two different roles. You know, he played himself in two different roles. And that’s what I took away from that. I said, Oh, that’s the way you approach it. You don’t have to try so hard; you have to try less hard. That’s a trick.

30 NINJAS: Was that an epiphany when you saw that, where you were thinking, OK, I can do more by doing less?

JL: When I saw it I was going, It can’t be done. It actually is even more riveting and exciting. Because, you see, when someone’s playing twins it’s either gonna be twice as good or twice as bad. (laughs)

In Part 2 of our exclusive interview, Johnny Legs talks about the intensity of co-star Harvey Keitel, acting with Robert De Niro, the historical baggage of playing a Latino with a gun, and how a local maniac in Leguizamo’s 1970s Queens neighborhood helped the actor portray a vivid killer. Read Now!