Posted on 07/14/2020 8:23:02 AM PDT by EdnaMode
ames Rodriguez was a freshman at New York University when the then-aspiring actor first learned that his Mexican-American heritage was going to be a problem for Hollywood.
He had just nailed an audition for a big feature film, but the casting director was put off by the fact that his Caucasian-like skin tone was out of sync with his last name. So he was offered the chance to read for the role of a gang member, only to be told that he wasn’t right for that, either.
“I didn’t look Latino enough,” he recalls. “They basically didn’t know what to do with me.”
The movie was Primal Fear. The lead role in question launched Ed Norton’s career.
Three years later, on the eve of his college graduation, Rodriguez nailed another big audition for a series-regular role in a buzzy, DreamWorks-produced TV pilot. But the issue of his counterintuitive surname came up again.
“They said, ‘You might want to give some real consideration to changing your name,'” he says.
And with that, James Rodriguez morphed into James Roday.
Two decades later, he’s morphing back: Wednesday’s anticipated premiere of Psych 2: Lassie Come Home (on NBCU’s new streaming platform Peacock) will usher in the arrival of James Roday Rodriguez.
In an extensive interview with TVLine, Rodriguez breaks down those “two inauspicious audition experiences” that led him to drop his birth name, and opens up about how — some two decades later — the death of George Floyd and the global reckoning with racial injustice that it triggered prompted him to take it back. He also reveals the key role his current series, ABC’s A Million Little Things, played in this awakening, and discusses the significance of his new moniker debuting in the opening credits of this week’s Psych sequel.
(Excerpt) Read more at tvline.com ...
If his name is irrelevant (e.g., because he was some D-lister no one ever heard of), then your original comment was probably also irrelevant.
Regards,
P.S. I like cheese.
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