Joe Mantegna

Joe Mantegna [referring to his voice role as mob boss Fat Tony]: Nothing interferes with my doing The Simpsons (1989)!

Joe Mantegna: You talk to the real cops and they say ninety percent of it is paperwork.

Joe Mantegna: You talk to cops who've been policemen thirty years and have never pulled their gun once.

Joe Mantegna: You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.

Joe Mantegna: You know, you want to research it as close to the resource material as you can, you know, where you're going to be drawing it from.

Joe Mantegna: You know, I have a very public life.

Joe Mantegna: You know the way I play golf, it's a good thing I do these things for charities.

Joe Mantegna: Yes actually, I have a child with Autism, so I'm very sensitive to groups involved with Autistic research.

Joe Mantegna: When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn't that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we're going to Moscow. We're going to Italy. We're going to Toronto. We're going to New York

Joe Mantegna: When I played Dean Martin, he was dead when we made the movie but there would have been nothing better than to spend a week with Dean Martin if I could have.

Joe Mantegna: When I grew up, on television there was a nice cross-section of things.

Joe Mantegna: We went out to Italy where I shot a film in Rome and Florence which is about a Renaissance painter.

Joe Mantegna: There's now a Fat Tony doll, which cracks me up. But you feel honored that they asked you to do a voice.

Joe Mantegna: There's good and evil going on. We have cops. We have robbers.

Joe Mantegna: There are a lot of people who will come to me for advice or whatever.

Joe Mantegna: That's why I really don't play cards or gamble. Because I'd crack.

Joe Mantegna: That's why I like the scenes where we're just in the kitchen having breakfast, because it's the interaction between people. The chaos.

Joe Mantegna: Television has taken a turn.

Joe Mantegna: So you do the best you can in the time frame you're in and hopefully try to make it better for those that follow you.

Joe Mantegna: So you can start backtracking all you like and say, as far as that goes, a hundred years from now they'll probably cure every disease there will be and the medical profession will be out of business.

Joe Mantegna: So whether it's the look of the person, the costuming that they wear, the clothes they wear, the mannerisms they have, the accent they might have, all of that, and those are externals but they help and it helps then give you a clue as to maybe then what's going on beyond that.

Joe Mantegna: So it's almost unique to see a show where you have a family as the core of it, and they're actually functioning.

Joe Mantegna: One of my daughters makes her debut as a film actress playing my daughter which was a great experience and in my hometown.

Joe Mantegna: It's almost like you create this, you take all these layers and put it all together and so you create this persona whatever it may be and then hopefully the script has inspired you in some direction to go with it, you know, and then all these little layers help define it for you.

Joe Mantegna: It was in that realm of Glengarry and Sexual Perversity in Chicago and a lot of the things that he had written, in the sense this is just a real solid, good script, with interesting characters and dialogue.

Joe Mantegna: In Amber's case, you are talking about someone who worked on a soap opera for eight years. If that's not the best training ground for an actress, I don't know what is.

Joe Mantegna: If you're going to believe in a God, then you also have to equally believe that there's a flip side to this.

Joe Mantegna: If at the end of the day, people look at it and say, oh, yeah, I liked his stuff, or for the most part I liked his stuff, or I've enjoyed watching some of the things he's done, that's all I can hope for.

Joe Mantegna:I've spent the better part of the last twenty-five years doing a lot of traveling.

Joe Mantegna: I've loved it, but I have a wife and two children.

Joe Mantegna: I've been with the same agent for over twenty years now. I trust his taste and input.

Joe Mantegna: I've been trying to do that as a golfer all my life. I go out there thinking I am Arnold Palmer and I know how to do this.

Joe Mantegna: I'm in the wrong racket if I didn't want a public life.

Joe Mantegna: I'm a character actor so I've jumped around to all kinds of things.

Joe Mantegna: I wouldn't be surprised if some day, they put the Simpsons in the Smithsonian. It's become part of our culture, those characters.

Joe Mantegna: I was never driven to be Babe Ruth.

Joe Mantegna: I was fascinated by the Supreme Court.

Joe Mantegna: I want to work on something that gives me some logic to it and maybe some longevity.

Joe Mantegna: I reached that day that I always thought might happen, where I say to myself I don't want to do this anymore. I'm looking for some stability. I want to stay home.

Joe Mantegna: I mean, you basically research the source material as much as you can obviously.

Joe Mantegna: I mean, it's the life lessons that I suppose you learn that nobody gets a free ride and that you do the best you can with the means that you can and try to open yourself to as much knowledge and all that that you can.

Joe Mantegna: I mean, I don't work with a system as an actor in the sense of method as much as it's a compilation of everything I've done and learned all my life.

Joe Mantegna: I mean, for quite a while now I've been involved with this one group out on the east coast called NAAR which is the National Alliance for Autistic Research and have done fundraisers for them and I'm on their advisory board, whatever help my name and interest and time to help in that research is.

Joe Mantegna: I mean, believe me, I'm not for censorship.

Joe Mantegna: I loved Ricky Roma. I thought he was heroic, in fact.

Joe Mantegna: I love what I do.

Joe Mantegna: I had an offer to do a third lead in a major film, but it took a lot of travel and rehearsal. Then I got offered First Monday.

Joe Mantegna: Whenever you're going to play a real person, you run the risk of well, everybody in the world kind of has an image of what that person is and who he should be and so you really have to do your homework.

Joe Mantegna: They put me in the drama class, and that's the path I've taken.

Joe Mantegna: I figured I had it all figured out. Yeah, okay, chick talks to God. I'm not ready to do Touched By an Angel II.

Joe Mantegna: I did plays and movies and whatever all over the place.

Joe Mantegna: For the last thirty years in my career I never know what I'm doing next.

Joe Mantegna: Dean Martin is one of my heroes.

Joe Mantegna: But what I will do is I'll acknowledge it and if it can be of any help the fact that I do acknowledge it then maybe other people will benefit from it because I do have somewhat of a public forum being in the line of work I am.

Joe Mantegna: But we're still in somewhat a Puritanical society in a lot of ways

Joe Mantegna: At the end of the meeting, I said to her, I'm going to roll the dice with you, honey. Win or lose, I'm with you on this.

Joe Mantegna: All I would say is that I tend to lean more towards in a way it's kind of what you're talking about of creating my characters from the outside in as opposed to go in and kind of little by little add all the little pieces and attributes and increments and visuals that create who I'm trying to be.