Fame and fortune: Enrico Colantoni -- Page 2
By Larry
Getlen • Bankrate.com
Born in Toronto, Canada, Enrico Colantoni sidestepped
the wishes of his Italian immigrant parents to do something "respectable,"
and crossed the border to pursue his acting dreams in New York.
After an initial rocky start in the Big Apple, Colantoni
has worked almost nonstop since graduating from the Yale School
of Drama. He portrayed Blush magazine's womanizing fashion photographer
"Elliott DiMauro" on "Just Shoot Me," worked
on stage in London in Neil LaBute's latest play, "The Distance
From Here," and cut his big-screen acting chops in feature
films "Full Frontal" and "Galaxy Quest." His
latest project is a new TV series -- recently renewed for a second
season -- called "Veronica Mars" in which he plays a sheriff
trying to solve the murder of his daughter.
In his spare time, Colantoni gives back by teaching
drama to Los Angeles youth at Inner City Arts, and devotes a lot
of time to Penny Lane, a residential treatment for at-risk youth.
Colantoni's love for the theater began with a drama
class he took while studying psychology and sociology at the University
of Toronto. Acting for him provided an outlet, for what he refers
to as the "damaged goods" side of his personality. He
remembers being deeply affected by attending the performance of
his brother in a high school play.
Bankrate: What clicked
when you saw your brother on stage?
Enrico Colantoni: It
was very exciting to be in a front row for the first time and watching
my brother, who was always beating me up, have so much fun up there.
We were all introduced to something that was rather foreign to us.
Bankrate: Were your
parents supportive of you getting the acting bug?
Enrico Colantoni: There
was a lot of resistance ... a lot of resistance. They really
didn't want me to leave home and go to New York. They wanted me
to go to school, get a standard education, come out as a lawyer
or a teacher, and do something more professional, more stable than
acting.
Bankrate: What about
supporting yourself, when you got to New York ... what jobs did
you have?
Enrico Colantoni: It
was difficult, because as a Canadian, I was on a student visa, and
I couldn't work until I got my green card. I had a principal at
my high school who really supported what I was doing, so he made
up a scholarship to help me get through those last couple of years,
so I could support myself until I got my green card, and then I
got to wash toilets and wait tables, anything, so I could pay my
rent.
Bankrate: And your
first acting job?
Enrico Colantoni: A
reenactment of John Belushi's last days, on a tabloid news show
called "A Current Affair" and they gave me $400 for a
week's work, and that was a sign for me that maybe I had made the
right choice. But of course, jobs were still few and far between
early on but that gave me the hope to stay in New York, to keep
studying, and it wasn't until I went back to school ... I went
to the Yale School of Drama ... and when I got out of there I
started doing theater across the country and started doing television.
That was back in 1993.
Bankrate: What's it
like working with people who haven't been classically trained as
you were?
Enrico
Colantoni: I do work with a lot of people who haven't
been trained a lot. Talent is talent. Anybody I've worked with can
act, but what a real training program gives actors is a sense of
professionalism, a sense of coming to work on time, doing a job.
I find that actors who haven't come from any formal sense of training
sort of have this false sense of entitlement, they don't really
appreciate what they have, they take it for granted, and I think
that's how bad work ethics start.
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