John Ortiz
Sometimes it seems like John Ortiz just cannot catch a break. A solid and reliable Latino actor, frequently playing equally solid and impressive Latino characters, Ortiz has been a major player in a variety of projects that just never got the attention they deserved, or where the project got noticed but John didn’t, or where fate itself intervened to make things more difficult than they should have been.
Over the last decade, he was in a series of critically respected but ultimately unsuccessful series, like Lush Life, The Job, and Clubhouse. Then, while he turned in well-respected guest performances, he made a mark in Pride and Glory, Fast and Furious, and American Gangster but never quite got noticed. Most recently, John has a pivotal role in The Silver Linings Playbook, one of the darlings of this year’s Oscars, but he seems to be left out of the above-the-line attention that his co-workers are receiving. And then there was Luck, the HBO series about modern-day horse-racing with Dustin Hoffman and a host of major players, that–through no fault of John (or apparently anyone else) didn’t even make it a full season, due to production nightmares that simply made it impossible to proceed.
John Ortiz in Luck
But John keeps keepin’ on…and now he’s been cast opposite Greg Kinnear in the new Fox comedy-drama Rake. Based on the Australian series, Rake follows “the chaotic and comedic life of criminal defense lawyer Keegan Joye (Kinnear), brilliant, frustratingly charming, and with zero filter.” Ortiz will play Ben, Keegan’s friend from law school. “They are yin and yang,” it says here. “and they know it. Ben is conservative, not flashy, an extremely decent family man who recognizes that Keegan is the performer of the two.”
Kinnear, who began playing broad characters–including himself–on Talk Soup and Mystery Men, has distinguished himself in more recent years. The two of them are an interesting and potentially volatile pairing; it will be fascinating to see how it all plays out, assuming the pilot makes it to prime time. Right now, you can catch Ortiz in Silver Linings Playbook at a theater near you.
