Let's face it. John Leguizamo is the unlikely success story that show business is all about. He is the scrappy little kid from Queens, NY, who left the neighborhood, but kept the scrappy.
"I never really had anything to lose after a certain point, so I guess that's what lets me go out there and say these crazy things because … well, I got more to lose than I ever did," Leguizamo said.
Now, with no less than 73 films and counting, Leguizamo is back on stage with his fifth, one-man show entitled "Ghetto Klown." He said it is his most personal yet.
"The other shows revealed a lot about other people. Like 'Freak' revealed a lot more about my parents and my father than anything else, and 'Sexaholics' was more just about my sexual failures kind of thing, which is kind of revealing," said Leguizamo.
Leguizamo said he was a class clown in school. Though he hasn't lost that completely, he has grown up and learned through trial and error that the audience can indeed connect with deeply personal stories.
"I mean we're all really basically the same species, so it doesn't matter," Leguizamo said. "…and I think the joy of it is, is a difference, just the different experience and the different prism that you're looking at things from."
In "Ghetto Klown," he also dishes on his film co-stars, such as Patrick Swayze from "Too Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar."
"We were dressed as chicks and we were -- I don't know -- too emotional so I guess we started PMS-ing and we thought we really were chicks, and we started fighting over the dialogue and stuff, and so I told my point of view, and then I heard that Swayze wrote about it in his book. So I went to his book and I found the chapter and I saw his point of view of what had happened in that situation, so it helped me understand and I put more of that in his dialogue," said Leguizamo.
"That's the weird thing about doing a one-man show, you got step out of that, you know, 'everything is happening to me, I'm not really the culprit.' Now I have to turn it upside down and go, 'I'm the culprit. How did I get there and why did these things happen to me?'" he said.
Direct from Broadway, "Ghetto Klown" opens at the Ricardo Montalban Theater on Sunday, Oct. 1, and runs for 15 shows.
