When John Leguizamo spoke out about diversity on Sunday night’s Emmy Awards telecast, he said, the audience at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles “got real quiet.”
“I’m one of Hollywood’s DEI hires,” he said from the stage. “That’s right. DEI: The D is for ‘diligence,’ the E is for ‘excellence,’ the I is for ‘imagination.’” He said the industry often engaged in “brownface” casting, citing Marlon Brando in “Viva Zapata!” Al Pacino in “Scarface” and Natalie Wood in “West Side Story.”
“Everybody played us,” Leguizamo said, “except us.”
Leguizamo said in an interview that, as he spoke that evening, he could see people in the audience start to nod along. “At first you could hear a pin drop,” he said. “Then it started building up momentum, and people were applauding and laughing and cheering. It was an incredible moment, and I felt like everybody had my back.”
Now, in his latest series, Leguizamo is playing what he calls a “despicable, hateable character” — and he wants as many people as possible to see it.
For Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, Leguizamo is partnering with Comcast to make his new show, “The Green Veil” available for viewing on his new streaming platform, The Network. The show will be offered to customers ad-free for one month on Xfinity X1, Flex, and other entertainment platforms. Comcast is the parent company of NBC News.
“The Network (platform) is free, all you have to do is subscribe,” Leguizamo said. “We’re doing a platform for diverse, quality stories, important stories.”
“The Green Veil” is an eight-episode drama starring Leguizamo in his first lead role on a dramatic television series. He plays Gordon Rogers, a government agent in the 1950s assigned on an unraveling secret mission.
Although Leguizamo describes “The Green Veil” as “historical fiction,” it draws on real-life events. Until Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978, federal and state governments forcibly separated as many as one-third of all Native American children from their families and homes, usually to be placed outside their communities. The Supreme Court upheld the ICWA last year.
The series explores issues of identity, assimilation and Latino and Native American history. The show launched in April and has already been renewed for a second season.
Leguizamo was drawn to “The Green Veil” in part because it is a period piece, and Latinos are usually not included in such projects. “Hollywood acts as if we didn’t exist until just now; they act as if we just got here,” he said. “We’ve been here since at least 1492, but it’s like we are erased from history in the media.”
“The Green Veil” is especially important to Leguizamo because several networks passed on it, leading him to help launch the new streaming platform created by Aram Rappaport, who also wrote and directed the show.
“We didn’t get picked up,” Leguizamo said. “It’s still a system that doesn’t cater to people of color, especially Latinos. We’re the most excluded group in Hollywood. We have to create our own platforms. We have to create our own content. We have to do it ourselves because nobody gives up power voluntarily.”
Although Latinos are a driving force at the box office, they are still underrepresented both behind and in front of the camera. The Latino Donor Collaborative found that the number of Latino leads on TV and film grew by only slightly last year — 2.6% to 3.3% for television, 5.1% to 5.7% in film.
Leguizamo is known as an actor, producer and longtime advocate for Latino representation in the entertainment industry. On screen, he has portrayed characters ranging from Toulouse-Lautrec (in “Moulin Rouge”) to drag queen Miss Chi-Chi Rodriguez (“To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!”). He won a special Tony Award for in 2018 for his one-man Broadway show “Latin History for Morons.”
While “The Green Veil” is the flagship series for The Network, the platform will also offer other original programming, such as “Chivalry,” a comedy series, and “Kingdom of Dreams,” a docuseries set in the fashion world.
Leguizamo is an entrepreneur across the entertainment industry. His miniseries “American Historia: The Untold History of Latinos” will premiere on PBS on Sept. 27, and his new play, “The Other Americans,” begins a run at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 19. His acclaimed docuseries “Leguizamo Does America” will return for a second season on MSNBC next year. He is also a producer of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” which will open on Broadway in March.
Leguizamo’s work is inspired by the passion he feels for authentic Latino stories and by the reaction he has seen from audiences. “The joy that I see in Latin people, in the audience, from fans and from our Black, Asian and white allies — it is everything.”
“People step up to me in the street and say they love the culture I represent, and that fuels me,” he added. “That fuels me so much. That love and feedback I get, it makes me feel like I have radioactive power inside me.”
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