Nick Mancuso: Feeding Caviar to the Masses - actor - Interview

TAKE ONE, Dec, 2001 by Harvey F. Chartrand

In 1985 Mancuso starred in another film with Carol Laure, the little-seen Night Magic, a musical directed by Lewis Furey and scripted by Leonard Cohen. Mancuso sang with admirable elan, but Furey dubbed his own voice in later. Frank Augustyn of the National Ballet helped Mancuso with the dance steps. Then, in the last week of shooting, the money ran out. "It was a very low-budget musical, and we were short $200,000. We all donated part of our salaries, so we could pay the crew and finish the film. Robert Lantos put in some more money, but no attempt whatsoever was made by Alliance to promote Night Magic, because they were putting everything they had into pushing Joshua Then and Now. So Night Magic didn't get any publicity, even though it's a masterpiece of writing by Leonard Cohen that should live in the annals of Canadian culture. But Lantos made no attempt to promote the film, and they had an awful woman from the federal government representing it at Cannes. No wonder Night Magic was buried."

Mancuso achieved quasi-mythical status with his short-lived NBC series, Stingray (1986-7), about an atypical private eye who drives around the country in a black Corvette Stingray and insists on being paid with favours. Despite its brief run, Stingray is now remembered as a classic television show of the 1980s. "Stephen [Cannell] told me that the Stingray character could have a Tennessee accent in one scene and play an Armenian schoolteacher in the next. He knew I could do that. The day after the first episode aired, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times all wrote reviews saying, 'Stingray is television at its best. Why don't they do more TV like this?' When Stephen first came to see me in New York, I said, 'I don't want to do a television show. I don't want to do screeching tires and I don't want to hold a gun.' Stephen said, 'No gun, no screeching tires.' Within no time at all, I had a gun in my hand and the tires were screeching all over the damn place. We only did one season of 22 epis odes, but the air dates were spread over two years. When I was here doing Matrix in 1993, they called me up and said they wanted to do Stingray for syndication. But I was working, so it never happened. Some things are meant to be, and Stingray definitely was not meant to be. It would have been nice to have done it for five or six years and comfortably retire."

In the years since Stingray, Mancuso has turned in consistently fine work, usually in low-budget, made-for-cable or straight-to-video productions. More often than not, he is the best thing in the picture. Among the highlights of his post-Stingray filmography are his amusing gangster in Rapid Fire (1992), a martial arts movie starring the late Brandon Lee; the outrageous pop artist Tully Woiwode in Oliver Stone's futuristic sci fi miniseries, Wild Palms (1993); and the bewildered travelling salesman who finds himself trapped in a strange hospital in the Twilight Zone-like Twists of Terror (1996).

However, Mancuso is probably best known for his role in Under Siege (1992), an action-adventure flick about the hijacking of an aircraft carrier by terrorists, in which he plays a CIA operative with the colourful name of Tom Breaker. "I played Breaker as a chain-smoking asshole," Mancuso quips. "At first, it was a small part, but then my scenes were expanded and became integral to the story. I wasn't in any of the aircraft carrier scenes with Steven Seagal, Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey. I was off in a room somewhere at the Pentagon. Under Siege was certainly the most successful film I ever did, because it made over $100 million. So, after being in the business for 30 years and having starred in 75 movies, the general public recognizes me mostly from my work in Under Siege and Stingray." Mancuso repeated his Breaker character in the 1995 sequel, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.