Exclusive John Leguizamo Interview: Religious Fanaticism in His Family and On-Set Secrets of His Bloody Double Life in The Ministers (Part 3)

Share on Facebook posted 10-15-09 by John Freeman Gill

It’s one thing for an actor to decide he wants to play identical-twin vigilantes from the South Bronx, as “Johnny Legs” Leguizamo does in The Ministers, which opens tomorrow. It’s quite another thing to pull it off. In Part 3 of his sit-down with 30 Ninjas editor John Freeman Gill, the actor talks about religious fervor in his own Catholic family and how he and director Franc Reyes developed the intricate choreography to sell the illusion that there were two John Leguizamos in the house.

Double Trouble

30 NINJAS: You told me that when an actor is playing twins in a movie it’s either going to be twice as good or twice as bad. It’s a risk, isn’t it?

JOHN LEGUIZAMO: Yeah, I definitely try to seek out the challenges. And much to Franc’s credit, he trusted me. But you know, I had to prove it to him. At first he was like, “Oh my god, John’s become egomaniacal, trying to get two salaries.” I said, “No, I’m not, man. You only have to pay me once for two parts.” And I think that’s what helped sell it. It took a lot of extra time to set up extra cameras and so forth. It took a lot more work.

30 NINJAS: He was worried he’d have to do literally double the [camera] set-ups?

JL: Yeah, and Franc’s genius was that he wanted to just show the actor playing me as little as possible. I thought that was a clever thing, because I was suggesting that we show a lot of him. But no, he said, “I don’t want to see hardly anything from that other guy” — even though they got a guy who looked just like me. And I think that helped sell it, too. But we had to do it so that one day I was one guy, and the next day I was the other guy. So we had to come back and do that scene in two days instead of one.

30 NINJAS: You would actually shoot it with a double there, so you weren’t just talking to space?

JL: I had a double, and we spent a lot of time preparing for like a month before, just me and him, rehearsing it. And he had to learn what I was gonna do, my intonations; we kind of discovered it together. He had to learn both parts, and I had to learn both parts, too. So when I came in, he knew exactly where I was gonna move as the other brother.

30 NINJAS: Were there times when you kind of had to shake your head, when you got to feeling a little schizophrenic, and you said, “Wait, which brother am I today? I just did this set-up playing the other guy yesterday.”

JL: Yeah, it was weird to have to yell at somebody who’s not there, because the other guy can’t really go off like me, not because he wasn’t able to, just because you didn’t want him to be in the scene too much. So I had to remember what I liked from my best performance from the day before, and Franc would tell me which performance he liked the best, so I would try to act to that memory of that energy. That was weird. It’s really a lot of effort.

Dancing With Myself

30 NINJAS: Was there a time when you felt, All right, this is going to work; I’ve nailed it.

JL: While we were doing it, I felt really excited by it, but I still didn’t know if it was going to work. I was really feeling like I was capturing two different souls, and I’m in the right location, and I feel like they’re really responding to each other, in my mind. But I was worried, when I saw it on film, would I believe it?

30 NINJAS: And what was it about Franc’s filmmaking that took it to another level and really sold it that you were two different characters?

JL: I think it was a lot of things. Me and him figured out that I needed to have a ton of rehearsal with my double, and [the double] and I had to go away and memorize the roles two different ways, my double and myself. And we learned the scenes, physically and emotionally, so I had to rehearse with him and figure out what I was going to do, because [normally] I never rehearse for a film too much (that’s a theater thing). And then Franc had a storyboard artist come in, and we would act the scene out and the guy would draw it out so Franc could have storyboards of it ahead of time to help him figure out how to shoot it. And then he was just shooting one me as one guy, and then one me as the other, instead of trying to do both in the same day; it would be too confusing otherwise. So it was all these little details. It sounds simple, but you had to come to those conclusions, those simple conclusions.

30 NINJAS: It actually doesn’t sound simple. It sounds like it’s difficult to make it simple.

JL: Actually, yeah, that’s what it was about. Because it seemed insurmountable at the beginning. So we had to break it down and figure out what would help us help me.

30 NINJAS: When you had a scene where you were going to play the two characters on separate days, did you find it easier to consistently do one of the characters first, the more disturbed brother or the more social brother?

JL: It was always easier to do the more social brother first. The more disturbed brother was more difficult because you had to find the right level of where he was in his mind; was he in a [subtle] manipulative mode, or was he already trying to manipulate by scaring him? Because the brother who was having issues, you know, [that character] can go so many different places when he’s trying to get something. Disturbed people are very clever. Even though they’re damaged, they’re incredibly clever at getting what they want.

So we’d shoot the disturbed brother second, because the more social brother was easier to shoot, and I knew I was going to try certain things, so I needed to save that discovery for the next day. You know, the more social brother was always going to hold back anyway; that’s just his tactic. The brother who wasn’t burned [in a childhood fire] has a much easier time of it. And he is held back and he’s trying to move away, and he’s not going to try to upset his [disturbed] brother because he knows [the disturbed brother] is guilty, and he’s going to run away from him. So he ends up being kind of masochistic, and taking abuse. So it was easier to shoot him first. The [more disturbed] brother was harder because it was like, is he gonna blow up on him, or is he gonna play it cool? It was trickier.

Growing Up With Religious Fanaticism

JG: This movie focuses in large part on religious fervor taken to an extreme. What was your own religious upbringing like?

JL: You know, I’m a recovering Catholic and part Seventh Day Adventist. My parents weren’t very religious. My grandmother was. I’m agnostic now. I have a whole different attitude toward religion. I like the traditions of it. I’m just not crazy about the way it divides and separates us, because we’re all really the same, the same human beings, the same race. So I don’t like the divisive aspects of religion.

JG: Were there or are there people in your life who helped you identify with the religious intensity of these brothers, or the one brother, if not the violent extremes he took his beliefs to?

JL: Oh yeah, my grandmother was very religiously fanatical. She was a Seventh Day Adventist. So, I mean, I saw that fervor, and you know, we would go to these Pentecostal churches growing up and all that, but I wasn’t religious. But you know, it’s interesting for me to see Franc, because he grew up Pentecostal, and I think he kind of believes in some of it still. Like we all did. You grow up religious a little bit, it still stays with you.

JG: In the trailer there’s a very powerful scene of one of the brothers reading scripture and saying that he’s minister of the word. I sort of felt this sense — you’re a talented actor, so you might have been able to pull this out of thin air or your research — but I got the impression from that scene that you had seen, not the violent part, but the intensity, the fervor of religion. That you’d known people who would get that worked up about religion.

JL: Oh yeah. Latin people are very Catholic, and my grandmother, Seventh Day Adventists are very passionate, and there’s a lot of fervor in that. And I did do research. I went to a lot of Pentecostal churches before I shot that and just watched quietly in the back and took it in, too.

In Part 1 of our exclusive interview, Leguizamo talks about the double jeopardy of playing twins, how director Franc Reyes created the illusion of two brothers with one actor, and how Jeremy Irons’ double duty in the freaky 1991 twins movie Dead Ringers provided inspiration: Read It Now!

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 It Now!