The Heartthrob of Santa Barbara

A Martinez

Joins the Legal Eagles of L.A. Law

by Bruce Feld

DramaLogue, America's Foremost Casting Newspaper

November 19-25, 1992

    Standing at the counter of a deli in Santa Monica, A Martinez, baseball cap stuck on backwards, could be a kid off the streets.  Even in his early maturity, married with two children, he looks far younger than his years.  Only a thoughtful, warm personality supports the notion that this "hot" and quite experienced actor, who won an Emmy at Cruz Castillo on NBC's daytime drama Santa Barbara, is now ready to litigate with men of real power and intellectual substance as Daniel Morales on L.A. Law.

   He begins with the letter "A," which is Martinez's real name.  "A came down from my grandfather, who just passed away at the age of 98," he explains.  "He passed away two years ago.  His name was 'Adolfo' and he passed it on to my father, who was his firstborn son.  They called my daddy, 'A.D.' or 'Junior.'  And I became the third, and was always called 'Little A' or 'A Bone' or 'Model A.'

    "I never use a period after the letter," he explains, "because it was not an initial.  It was a name.  It's important to keep that connection in your childhood, which is why I have kept my first name."

    And how does it feel to be a heartthrob?  "Well," he says after some reflection, "it's certainly preferable to being ignored, which was the other facet of my career.  You know, I'm extremely thankful, seriously, for people to have an opinion of any kind about me.  because I was in the game a long time without a sense that I mattered to anybody.  And I got pretty nervous about that at certain times and thought, 'Maybe I'm fooling myself into thinking there's some kind of movement that's going to occur to lift my own personal sky.  Maybe it's not in the cards for me.  Maybe my own dreams are a bit overblown.'  But the reality of the career from my point of view is that I feel the struggle almost always to just do adequately well.

    "I've been doing it a long time.  I know a lot about it.  Yet on any given day I can be looking at some kind of a crisis where it just seems way harder than it should.  I seek to avoid those days.

    "I get the occasional experience where my confidence in my ability to do it collapses.  I remember an episode for Santa Barbara -- Michelle Phillips was on the show that day -- I got into a bad frame of mind and I just came apart.  It became a situation where I had to execute the performance a line at a time.

    "They would cut the camera, and I would do the next line.  They would cut again, and I would do the next line.  One line at a time.  Granted, that's one day out of 1,600 performances of that character.

    "A day like that signals the end of it all.  I know that in me is that potential.  I know the capacity to do this well is a delicate thing.  What the career is about for me is managing it -- continuing to step up to the line on a regular basis and produce.  It's thinking about what I can do to maximize my capacity to do that.

    "I think twice before I drink any wine with dinner.  I used to do that with impunity, now I think twice.  I think about everything I eat all the time.  Thinking about the level of preparation you have achieved as opposed to what you could achieve if you were to ignore your kids all week.  I try to find that balance between how much I want to give myself over to this, and how much I want to enjoy real life.  It's so complicated -- from the standpoint of keeping it together and doing it well -- that the idea of whether I'm perceived as a heartthrob or not doesn't enter my thinking at all."

    Ironically, John Wayne was indirectly responsible for A Martinez's career.  His help is especially significant when one considers that Powwow Highway -- a film in which the Indians are definitely the heroes and which is Martinez's favorite film to date -- starred Gary Farmer and Martinez as Native Americans, working under the sensitive direction of Jonathan Wacks.  The film Martinez made with Wayne wasThe Cowboys, and to this day he is amazed he got the part.

    "The Cowboys is the linchpin on which my career has hung," he admits.  "I auditioned and was simply told, 'They like you but...'  It was only later, after a few weeks went by, that they called me back and made me read one last time.  I heard, talking to people, about the other three people they had said yes to, who for one reason or another couldn't do it.

    "One of them was a kid who was in a juvenile detention program out of state.  I'm not sure how he got connected to the project.  I guess he did something that angered his probation officer or his legal supervisor -- and that person yanked him.  I often wondered what doing the part might have meant to that kids' life.

    "Who knows?  I think people outside this business have no idea how tenuous it all is.  No matter how much success an actor may encounter, he is always so close to his failure.

    "I've had a career many people would trade for.  Yet through it all there has been this sense of just squeaking through many critical passages.  It never goes away.

    "I was intimidated by John Wayne.  He was so big.  My parents had taken us to see every John Wayne movie when we were kids.  Going to the movies meant going to the drive-in. And going to the drive-in meant you had to wear your pajamas, because we always fell asleep on the way home.  Wearing your pajamas meant being embarrassed when you went to the snack bar during intermission because you had to take a pee, hoping someone from school, or somebody you knew, would not see you.

    "When I met him, i felt like a little kid in my pajamas.  I didn't know how to begin to talk to John Wayne.  It wasn't until the wrap party about four and a half months later -- with a significant amount of tequila in my stomach -- that I was able to talk a little bit to him about how much I admired him.

    "As for Powwow Highway, I don't think I as as good in it as I could have been.  My character carried all the political water in the film -- and I don't think I did as good a job as I might have of fully humanizing him.

    But the guy that played my partner, Gary Farmer, was brilliant.  The stuff between us -- in the sense of affection between two men -- was special.  I loved that movie.  It was shot on a shoestring.  When the weather went bad it created a horrible crisis in the schedule.  We had all kinds of trouble getting it done.  Then to have it turn out as well as it did was a big satisfaction.

    "It's also satisfying to do L.A. Law.  I just started in the middle of August.  I think we're on the eighth episode now.  I'm in every episode, it's all set out in advance.  There was some talk about having everyone on the show agree to appear in 17 out of 22 episodes, but to my knowledge no one wanted to do that.  I think it's just intrinsic that an actor wants to avoid letting the writers figure out how not to use him.

    "That's the way I always felt working on Santa Barbara.  You want to be there as much as possible.  It's probably insecurity, more than anything else, at least on my part.  I want to start to seem important enough that I need to be there every week.

    "So my representatives and I insisted on doing all 22 L.A. Laws.  Inevitably, sometimes you have three lines and just appear in the background.  But still it's okay.  It's a better solution. I get excited of course, when I see a big chunk of dialogue, especially as I'm just starting off and still trying to find a character and hungry for information.  The shows where you have little to do and have no possible hope of shaping any scene you're in leave you feeling really vulnerable.  Whereas the ones where you're standing in front and impose your rhythms on things are a lot easier."

    Speaking of imposing rhythms, how did he deal with working with an actor universally regarded as a master of her craft -- namely Meryl Streep -- when Martinez played her butler-turned lover?

    "The great thing about being in this business is that you get to meet people like her," he says.  "For my money, Meryl Streep is the best actor I've ever seen.  I mean, the experience of watching her  give the speech in Sophie's Choice where she's trying to explain what it's like to give up one of her children to the Nazis -- knowing death awaits.  She's sitting at a window, and she's trying to explain...it doesn't get any better than that.  That's the pantheon!

    "I was on the set of She-Devil a day early, and Susan Seidelman was taking me around.  Next thing I know I'm being introduced to Meryl Streep.  I told her how I felt about her, hopefully more gracefully than other times when I've been reduced to gushing.  I just tried to get it done clearly, and be honest about it.  Then the next day I had to go to work with her.  The most interesting phenomenon was that I couldn't find anything else to say, except to talk about the work when there was something to address.  Because in my heart was an overwhelming sense of admiration, and I had already expressed that."

    A less reverent experience, if equally educational, was when Martinez made Once Upon a Scoundrel with Zero Mostel.

    "He would refuse to repeat anything ever.  I mean, I would be in a scene with the guy and I would be constantly struggling not to become a member of the audience," Martinez sighs.  "He would take off on a bit -- and then the bit would turn into another bit, and then bits inside the bit, and it would run and run and run.

    "It would be like holding onto fumes to figure out anything I could do that would be at all useful.  He would turn to me and say, 'I'm going to give you a laugh.  Here's what you do:  You say this, just like this, and it'll be funny.'  And sure enough, it was great!"

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