The release of In the Heights (in theaters and on HBO Max now) feels like a siren song, beckoning fans back to the big screen. After a year-long delay and mass theater closures, no one is more excited to watch the splashy musical with an audience than Jimmy Smits. The veteran actor caps off four decades in Hollywood by playing Kevin Rosario, the protective businessman father of Nina (Leslie Grace). “I was in heaven to be working away and revving up all cylinders,” Smits tells Katey Rich on this week’s Little Gold Men. It was a role he had been lobbying to play since first seeing an Off-Broadway production of In the Heights back in 2007.
After securing the part with the musical’s creator Lin-Minuel Miranda and director Jon M. Chu, Smits began devising playlists of Broadway tunes and Puerto Rican songs to immerse himself in the character. “It’s like the summer song that you listen to every summer of your life,” he explains. “You can hear notes from those songs and it can take you back to that time in the ‘80s or the ‘70s, wherever you were. So music can affect me that way and it keeps me in my zone.” Smits also opened up getting his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, being mentored by Gregory Peck, and voting with the Oscars’ new diversity standards.
Elsewhere on this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, founding co-host Mike Hogan is back with Katey Rich, Richard Lawson, and Joanna Robinson to unpack the legacy of 1950’s All About Eve. They also preview the Cannes Film Festival lineup before Sonia Saraiya speaks with The Good Lord Bird’s Ethan Hawke.
Listen to the episode above, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. We’d also love to hear from you via text, which you can sign up for here.
Read a partial transcript of the Jimmy Smits interview below.
Well, I know a lot of people who saw this movie last February when they had started showing it to people. Then, [they] of course had to not talk about it for over a year because the movie got held back. How has it felt this past year kind of knowing what you had made, having seen maybe some of it and having to keep it to yourself for such a long terrible year?
Oh, Katey, I got to tell you, I never got to see it. I know there are a couple of journalists that I’ve talked to during this whole junket that had seen a version of it.
But you hadn’t seen it?
Oh no, absolutely not. All I saw was that teaser I just referred to a little while ago. It was November or December that we had a trailer or teaser release party in New York for TikTok or something. Then next thing you know there was a pandemic and they’re talking about “movies might never be the same again.”
Were you anxious to have to wait though, thinking it was going to come out last summer and then having to wait a whole year, or have you just been happy to wait until we could see it in theaters?
Well, the universe aligned for the film, I think. But what happened in the ensuing 14 months was wacky and tragic on so many levels that we as a society have had to contemplate medical issues. But so much other stuff has happened. This whole social dynamic that we have been dealt with with regards to politics and the assault on politics and all these social issues, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ and immigration issues. All these things that have happened during this lockdown has made us, hopefully, think about things, reckon with things. The film, to me, is like it’s going to be a little bit of joy, the gumbo after the storm in terms of being opened up and available. With regards to the film, [it’s] something that might be viewed as a specific lens of a community, but by the same token, and because of the delivery system of being a musical, maybe more accessible because music does what it does, giving the joy that is able to be conveyed through that medium, through that genre as well.
A universal joy even if you’ve never been to Washington Heights.
Absolutely. Because those themes, again, are community and what does home mean and family, all those things.
Are you excited to return to the big screen though? To see not yourself on the big screen, but to watch a movie on a big screen?
Oh, absolutely. 100%. And 100%, because, you guys talk about this all the time, there’s something about the communal experience of being in the theater, a dark theater, and going to that place and feeling the energy of an audience. It’s what we feel in the theater, on the stage when the energy between an actor and audience on stage is incredible, because it breathes. So as an audience member it’s exciting to be transformed in that kind of way as well.
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