Morales: No More Bad Guys

Esai Morales doesn’t want to talk about his high-profile television pilot or his upcoming TV miniseries. He’s finished--for the day, anyway--anguishing over his acting career, which has had more ups and downs than a novice skier on a black diamond run.

What Esai Morales really wants to tell you about is what happened last night at the local pool hall, where he stepped between two hulking men just in time to prevent bloodshed.

Playing a peacekeeper might seem a stretch for Morales, who is more typically cast as brooding and short-tempered. But that’s just the point. Esai Morales isn’t really a jerk, he says, he just plays one on TV. And in the movies. And, come to think of it, on the stage, too.

“I hate to say this,” he says anyway, “but when there’s a role for a nice guy . . . they pick what they call a more mainstrean-looking person. I’d like to cross over. I’d like to be a human being.”

He could take a big step in that direction next week if CBS elects to pick up “Sherman Oaks,” a smart drama that stars Morales as an over-the-hill boxer battling a number of personal crises. He’s also featured in the NBC miniseries “Atomic Train,” which airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m.

But for Morales, who has appeared in just two studio films since 1995, the fact that he’s getting roles again isn’t as important as the kind of roles he’s getting. In “Sherman Oaks,” he says, his character is noble, sympathetic, “a guy who’s been wronged but maintains his character.” In “Atomic Train,” an action-adventure about a runaway train laden with atomic waste and a live nuclear bomb, his character is . . . well, his character’s a jerk. (After a last minute reedit due to concern about potential public reaction, the train is now carrying “hazardous chemicals” and the film, a disclaimer identifying it as fiction.)

But for Morales, “Atomic Train” came with a twist because this time the jerk is Scottish, not Latino.

“Why can’t I play a guy named Mac?” Morales asks. “I didn’t want to do something that would be perceived as going backward. But I noticed that the character wasn’t about being Latino.

“I’d like not to sell myself out. I’d like not to play everybody’s Jose or Paco.”

Dennis Hammer, the executive producer of “Atomic Train,” didn’t want that either. He says Morales was the only one considered for the role of Denver police Capt. Noris “Mac” MacKenize, and changing that name to match the actor “just didn’t seem relevant.”

But if race wasn’t relevant, reputation was--which is why Morales wound up playing the churlish antihero once again.

“With someone like Esai and the body of work he has, everyone knows him,” Hammer says. “Most actors come with a certain kind of natural equipment that makes them appropriate for certain kinds of roles. [But] just because we haven’t seen Esai do a light, romantic comedy doesn’t mean he can’t.”

Born in New York to Puerto Rican parents--his father was a welder, his mother a top East Coast organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union--Morales entered the prestigious New York High School for the Performing Arts when he was 14. He made his acting debut as a student, opposite the late Raul Julia in “The Tempest” at New York’s Shakespeare Festival Park. But in his first big-screen feature, 1983’s “Bad Boys,” he played a gang member. And when he followed that four years later with “La Bamba,” in which he won critical acclaim for his role as singer Ritchie Valens’ jealous, angst-ridden brother, the die was typecast. Morales has played dark, moody characters ever since.

“I find it kind of sad,” he says. “The hardest thing is to play someone who is a good guy, yet appealing, yet with an edge. And that’s what I’d like to do.”

In other words, he’d like to play himself. From across a corner table in a sun-splashed room at the Four Seasons Hotel, Morales’ passionate brown eyes sparkle, but not with the fire they’re so often given on the screen. In conversation his voice is surprisingly soft, so when he leans forward on his elbows to make a point, he comes off as sympathetic and sincere, not dangerous and devious. And when he veers off on a tangent about politics, the environment or the international drug trade, he comes off as well-read, too.

“The great thing about being an actor,” he says “is sometimes you have a lot more time on your hands than most people. [So] you read and learn.”

As a result, he’s protested runaway production alongside laborers from the Hollywood crafts workers, worked to raise money for Central American refugees and was a founding board member of E.C.O. (Earth Communications Office), a clearing house for environmental information.

‘There’s Always a Compromise’

But having opinions in Hollywood is one thing; refusing to ever waver from them is something else. So while Morales has rallied to stop production companies from taking work out of Hollywood, he quietly worked on “Atomic Train,” which was filmed in Vancouver.

“I’ve resigned myself to the fact that if I were only going to do things that I believed were true, noble and good--lofty projects--I might as well turn in my SAG card,” Morales says. “Because I would never work. There’s always a compromise somewhere down the line.”

It’s that more serious, human side that Morales, 36, wants to bring to the screen. The big screen, that is. Television, he hopes, is nothing more than a temporary detour.

“There’s no guarantee I’ll get back to the movies,” he says. “I may get stuck on television. And I’ll be damned if that happens.”

But after years of working primarily in independent films and smaller projects, Morales says he must first rediscover himself and his public, and TV provides an opportunity to do just that.

“I didn’t take television seriously previously,” says Morales. “ But if that’s where people are, then I want to find them. And I want them to find me.

“Every once in a while you find people going, ‘Hey, man are you still acting?’ And it hurts. Yeah, I’m still acting.”

Maybe not for long. Although Morales’ comeback is picking up steam--”With all this heat from this television stuff I’ve been doing, people now are sending me better [movie] scripts,” he says--what he ultimately hopes to do is direct. And while he’s read a few scripts and has had some formal meetings about developing projects for the Spanish-language Telemundo network, he’s still a long way from anything concrete.

Which is probably just as well. Hollywood isn’t ready for a choir-boy actor with a bad-boy reputation who’s looking to use movies to get in touch with his feminine side.

“It’s all about ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction,’ things that are cool now,” he says. “Well, when is being a good human being going to be cool again?”

* “Atomic Train” airs at 9 p.m. on NBC Sunday and Monday. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

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“When there’s a role for a nice guy . . . they pick what they call a more

mainstream-looking person. I’d like to cross over. I’d like to be a human being.”