Aiello not interested in playing stereotypes

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This article was published 25/08/2018 (2793 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

New York actor Danny Aiello has played many roles in his life, from Cher’s cuckolded fiancé in Moonstruck to Madonna’s angry dad in the Papa Don’t Preach video.

But his most indelible role, the one for which he was nominated for an Oscar, was as Sal, the hot-under-the-collar pizzeria owner in 1989’s Do the Right Thing.

So it would seem like a cute casting twist to have him play a nonno (grandfather) whose amazing way with dough has helped make Pizzeria Napoli the pride of the neighbourhood.

However, the 85-year-old admits he wasn’t the first choice to play the role of Carlo in the Canadian rom-com Little Italy (which opened in theatres Friday).

He stepped in after another actor dropped out, in part as a favour to the film’s director, Donald Petrie.

Petrie, it turns out, is the son of Daniel Petrie, who helmed Fort Apache, The Bronx, the 1981 drama in which Aiello co-starred with Paul Newman and Ed Asner.

“My love affair began for the picture because I knew Donald’s father and loved him,” Aiello said. “And (Donald) worked on that movie with me — he was 20 years old and he played a cop who got killed.”

Still, it wasn’t without some hesitation, Aiello admits: he’s always been hesitant to be typecast in roles that play into Italian-American stereotypes.

“I was brought in as a pinch-hitter, but I was reluctant to do it because they told me it was about pizza,” he said. “Had they had me making a pizza in the movie, I wouldn’t have done it.

“You know, a long time ago, McDonald’s was featuring pizzas, they had a test market and they offered me a million dollars to be the spokesman. I turned it down because all I saw was me with a baking cap on my head flipping pizzas, and I didn’t want people to be thinking of me as the pizza man.”

Little Italy does trade in some of those stereotypes — much like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, it’s an affectionate but exaggerated look at Italian families — but for his part, Aiello reined in any over-the-top mannerisms.

“In this movie, because it’s comedic, people sometimes get a little beyond where they should be,” he said.

“But I make sure that any comedy that I do as an Italian, it’s not ginzo, if you’ll excuse my language. You know ginzo, it’s like the guys with the wet hair poking up… I hate that. It’s not that I’m prejudiced — I’m an Italian — but I hate the look.”

Though pizza does play an important role in Little Italy, the film’s real focus is on the romance between Nikki (Emma Roberts) and Leo (Hayden Christensen) as the children of feuding pizzeria owners — think Romeo and Juliet, but in Toronto instead of Verona.

However, the secret affair between Aiello’s Carlo and Franca (Andrea Martin), the mother of his son’s bitter rival, might be the movie’s real heart.

Luckily, Aiello knows all about true love — he and his wife, Sandy Cohen, have been married since 1955; he calls her “a tough little Jewish broad,” who looks like Lana Turner.

“They were apprehensive about me,” he recalls of her parents’ thoughts about their daughter marrying a pool hustler who’d dropped out of school and joined the army at 17.

“I had cigarettes in my sleeve, I had a missing tooth — I was a tough kid from the Bronx. But I fell in love with Sandy. Our thing was like Grease, Sandy and Danny…

“My mother-in-law said it would never last,” Aiello said, recalling that their religious differences were an imposing hurdle. “But then, when I became something of a success, the difficulty was with Sandy… my first movie, I was 40. It was difficult for her, because suddenly she’s seeing me in movies with women, kissing.

“This is something no one else has told you: my daughter Stacey and my wife would get tapes of movies that I’d done or was doing at that moment. They would play it and reverse it if it was a love scene; they would look and see if my mouth was ever open when I was kissing a girl. I made sure that every kiss I ever gave was so phony… there was nothing sexy about it because I was afraid!”

Sandy has nothing to fear from Andrea Martin, certainly: in his love scene with her in Little Italy, her husband not only keeps his mouth closed, but his shirt on.

At 85, Aiello could easily rest on his laurels, but instead, it’s as if he’s making up for his late start as an actor.

In 2014, he penned an autobiography, called I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else, and is about to release Hangin’ Out, his fifth album as a vocalist. He’s also working on a stage musical by Robert Mitchell called Capone, in which he plays notorious gangster Al Capone on the last day of his life.

“I have a burning need to work.”

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @dedaumier