Andy Garcia defines himself in ways you wouldn't expect. He does not think of himself as a Hispanic actor. He does not think of himself as a leading man. He does not even want to think of himself as a movie star.
These are interesting ways not to think of yourself, particularly when you're an actor with leading-man looks, a heartthrob out of Havana and Miami, an Oscar nominee for "Godfather III" - and widely regarded as the one sure thing if there is a "Godfather IV."They also are disclaimers - Garcia's attempts to be free of someone else's labels.
So which labels WOULD he use?
Here's a clue. Our interview has run well over its allotted time. Garcia has been talking about his new film, "Hero," among other things, and we have kept the next interviewer waiting outside the hotel suite. Garcia apologizes.
"Sorry, but you get two local boys together, we could talk all day."
Local boy. Now in Hollywood, where the business is all about faking it, there are many poses. Perhaps this is just another. After all, Garcia and his family - wife Marivi, daughters Dominik, Daniella and Alessandra - live in California now; Andy and Marivi left Miami for the other coast, where the work is, in 1978.
But Miami is where Garcia was in the days after Hurricane Andrew hit, helping Gloria Estefan and her crew load a 40-foot trailer with water and food. (Actually, it turns out, Garcia and his family rode out the storm in Coral Gables, Fla., where they have a second home - lots of trees down, otherwise OK.) And Saturday night, there was Garcia again, emcee of the marathon benefit concert at Joe Robbie Stadium.
More telling, in a quiet way, was what Garcia had to say last weekend to the 100-odd reporters who were in Los Angeles to hear about "Hero," in which Garcia stars opposite Dustin Hoffman and Geena Davis. Garcia plays a homeless character named Bubber who is mistaken, by a combination of happenstance and image-mongering by a frenzied media pack, for a man who saved 54 people from the burning wreck of a crashed airliner. So it was natural that Garcia would be asked about heroes, and about the homeless. In two days of nearly nonstop interviews with print, radio and television press, he managed to steer the conversation back to Andrew every time.
The homeless? "We had homeless in South Florida before, but now the problem is much larger." Heroes? "In South Florida I saw a tremendous number of people acting heroically."
While it is Estefan who has been called "Miami's own" so often that it seems to have become part of her name, it is Garcia, who attended Miami Beach High and got his first reviews (good, bad) for theater productions at Florida International University and the University of Miami, and who walks the homeboy walk. It's no pose.
So neither, you figure, are the other disclaimers.
Not a leading man, for instance. "I don't approach the work that way," he says. "If they happen to offer me a great part, I'll do it. . . . I'll play a supporting part if it's something I want to play. I consider myself a character actor, and I don't want to lose that aspect of my work."
Garcia did come to "Hero" for the character role. He wanted the part of Bernie Laplante, the scrofulous little lowlife who is the real hero but whose luck is so bad no one will believe him. When he found that Hoffman was up for the part, Garcia says, he figured, "maybe next time." But then director Stephen Frears ("Dangerous Liaisons," "The Grifters") asked him to think about the Bubber part. Done.
But since he'd once read for Bernie, does Garcia think the movie could have worked with the lead roles reversed? His answer is characteristic: "Dustin could do anything."
Whatever he thinks, Garcia IS a movie star - he has been at least since "Godfather III," and probably since he stood up to Richard Gere in "Internal Affairs," and maybe even since his turn, largely improvised, as Angel, the psychopathic drug dealer in the late Hal Ashby's "Eight Million Ways to Die."
"But I don't see my life in those terms," he says. "I'm just an actor. I go to work. I have no aspirations to commercial success at all. I have aspirations to do great movies. First you have to do good work and honest work and brave work. The rest will take care of itself. And if not, the creative process was rewarding. That's all you ask for."
When Garcia says he doesn't see himself as a Hispanic actor, either, you have to pay attention. He's not saying he doesn't want the good Hispanic roles, and he's not dodging an ethnic identity. Quite the opposite: "I'm Hispanic, more specifically, a Cuban who happens to be an actor. I think it's important to get away from the hyphenating of the profession of actor. Usually it's only minorities that get the hyphenation."
Garcia has strong feelings about Hollywood's treatment of minority actors, and the feelings aren't good. When it's pointed out to him that the "industry" has a reputation for liberal enlightenment, he says, "Yes. On paper. I'm not sure it's getting better. I think the actors who happen to be of an ethnic minority do not get as many opportunities.
"Some of the greatest performances on film have been given by actors of one ethnic minority playing someone totally different. You have to cast an actor for the qualities he has, not for where he's from. Otherwise Jose Ferrer had no business playing Cyrano." Or, for that matter, Andy Garcia playing Vincent, the illegitimate son of the departed Sonny Corleone.
Still, Garcia acknowledges the protests of ethnic groups facing just that sort of casting. "In theory, any actor should be able to play any part if he has the ability. But that's theory. The people who are protesting are saying, `Hey - we're not getting opportunities to approach other types of work. When finally a role comes up when we can say, "This is one of us," and we STILL don't get the opportunity, where are we?"'