John Leguizamo

John Leguizamo was born in Bogota, Colombia, and has appeared in more than a hundred films, produced more than twenty films and documentaries, and made more than thirty television appearances. He has written and performed for the Broadway stage, taking four Tony Award nominations for Freak in 1998, Sexaholix in 2002 and Latin History for Morons in 2018, receiving a Special Tony Award in 2018, and winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program.

The stage work explains the screen work. He is fundamentally a monologuist, and he is at his best when a part gives him room to talk fast and take up space. Benny Blanco in Carlito's Way is barely six minutes of screen time and is the performance people quote thirty years later, because he plays a small-time hustler with the self-regard of a kingpin and never blinks. Tybalt in Romeo + Juliet, Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge!, Chi-Chi Rodriguez in To Wong Foo and Cholo in Land of the Dead all run on the same fuel: characters who are performing themselves at all times.

The second career is voice work, and it is the one most people have actually heard. Sid across five Ice Age features and a Christmas special is a nasal, needy, relentlessly talkative performance that carried a franchise for well over a decade, and Bruno in Encanto is the most affecting thing he has done in animation. Alongside that he keeps taking small live-action parts that sharpen a film, from Aurelio in the John Wick pictures to Martin in Chef, and he played Raymond Santana Sr. in When They See Us, the most restrained work on his CV.