From the Toronto Star:
This close to being John
Malkovich
RITA ZEKAS
You've seen him everywhere.
You know his face but you can't place the name.
Fulvio Cecere is but one of a legion of VCA's: veteran character actors.
He has been in more than 100 productions: in X Files, The Commish;
Jag; Beggars And Choosers; Nero Wolfe; Cold Squad; Highlander; Outer Limits,
Dark Angel; Earth: Final Conflict; Relic Hunter; Tracker; Dead Zone;
Smallville; Witchblade; Odyssey 5; Hurricane; Double Jeopardy; The Bone
Collector; and Excess Baggage.
You would have seen him in Intersection with Richard Gere and
Sharon Stone, but he was left on the cutting room floor.
He did make the cut in Best In Show. "I'm the airport passer-by
that Parker Posey's dog tries to bite," he explained. "Christopher
Guest shot 59 hours of videotape and somehow I made the cut. I'm delighted."
Cecere, who splits his time among L.A., Vancouver, Toronto and New York, was in
Toronto taking care of condo business before returning to Vancouver to shoot
the John Woo film Paycheck, in which he plays an FBI agent
chasing Ben Affleck .
"It's the weirdest thing," he claimed. "It all depends on the
city. In L.A. or New York, I'm the bad guy. In Canada, I'm good guys: cops, FBI
or military."
His life is even weirder. His life sounds like a TV-movie directed by Quentin
Tarentino. He was born in Montreal 43 years ago and raised in New Jersey.
"My dad was a barber and my mom a seamstress," he related. "They
were right off the boat from Italy."
He was intense as a kid. In Grade 7, he lost the lead role of Captain in H.M.
S Pinafore to his understudy when he came down with pneumonia. He was so
devastated — and melodramatic — he quit acting until he was 23.
It was round about the time of this aborted acting debut that the family
relocated to New Jersey. At 17, Cecere worked part-time at a supermarket and
was shot one night when he tried to help his manager during a robbery attempt.
That got him face time on local talk shows and newspapers and a 38 special slug
in his abdomen. But Cecere obviously didn't learn from the experience.
"In Vancouver, I took down a shoplifter," he admitted. "He was a
drug user; I found needles. I tackled him and held him down — I was a
wrestler in high school. My shoulder still bothers me."
Cecere took business at New Jersey's Montclair State College and took pleasure ”
a year of non-stop parties ” at the University of Miami.
He graduated from Montclair with a degree in political science and a paralegal
certificate and briefly entertained the idea of becoming a lawyer, studying law
for one year in L.A.
"It was beyond boredom," Cecere winced. Instead, he gave acting
another shot. "This month 20 years ago, I took my first acting class at
UCLA," he calculated. He supported himself doing extra work, parking cars,
bartending and driving a limo.
He got his Screen Actor's Guild card by uttering "Thanks Doc" on a
soap. Those words would have been preserved for posterity had not George
Bush the elder chosen that particular time to declare war on Iraq and
pre-empt regular programming.
"I'm a character actor and proud of it," Cecere stated. "No
one's gonna hire me as a leading man. You can make an argument about Jack
Nicholson being a leading man but he's not like Redford or Colin
Farrell or Steve McQueen. I was reading Guy Stockwell's obit
— he was a character actor who appeared in over 200 productions. I'm like
him. I'm going to die and do 200 jobs and no one knows me. I'm the hired gun
who makes the stars look good."
That's a tad disingenuous. He's hardly anonymous. Cecere has a Web site built
by Nero Wolfe fans, fulviocecere.com, that even includes his baby
pictures.
I couldn't stand it any longer: "Has anyone ever told you that you look
like John Malkovich?"
"Yes," he conceded. "I auditioned for a part in Knockaround
Guys and they loved me. But I didn't get the job because I looked too much
like John Malkovich. He'd be torturing me and people would be confused. Same
thing in The Third Miracle. (Director) Agnieszka Holland loved
me. I didn't get the part because I looked too much like Ed Harris.
"I also get Robert Duvall, the occasional Woody Harrelson, Richard
Dreyfuss and Enrico Colantoni from Just Shoot Me."