Bonus! Before he was Gomez Addams, Raul Julia mastered Shakespeare & cyberpunk
Of course we love Raul Julia for his Gomez Addams. But there's so much more to his career: Making Shakespeare Puerto Rican, dabbling in a sort of pre-The-Matrix cyberpunk movie, a recurring role on Sesame Street ... and of course, his later role in Street Fighter. So for this week's bonus video, we're taking a look at some of his fascinating overlooked roles.
Backup link in case the video doesn't play: https://youtu.be/LUBzUm1Qolw
Comments (15)
Two other memorable roles were his parts in Moon Over Parador (with Sonia Braga!) And Tequila Sunrise (he has a small but extremely memorable part)
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is my favorite MST3K episode. Even a big stupid anteater knows this is the best episode. 😄 Time Chasers is up there as well.
I will be looking up Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. He was an incredible Gomez, but Bison is just on another level. Yes, the movie is a mess, but you nailed it. Great bits in there. The Shakespeare makes sense. I was too young for KotS in the theater, but saw it in college. I don’t think I’ve seen it since.
I first saw Raul Julia in 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' (1985) and when I heard he'd died, I cried because his acting in the film was deeply touching in that film.
Always loved Raul Julia, the first thing I saw him doing was sesame street. Never knew about the Shakespeare in the park stuff he did. Wish I could have seen some of that. The first time I learned about Shakespeare in the park was from Tootsie. Btw what is colorless casting, how did it get started and did it have anything to do with ordinary wells and his all black Shakespeare plays he and a few others were putting on in the 1930’s, some of which I think were put on in parks.
Color-blind casting is the practice of casting people “of-color” into roles regardless of whether those roles were written as characters “of-color”. It ignores the “white as default” assumptions of most art. I think it appropriate to cast different races and ethnicity in Shakespeare because he made his characters ethnically diverse. But I wouldn’t say the practice started with him. I think you are mentioning Orson Welles’ “ethnic” production of Shakespeare, which is, IMHO, sort- of in that tradition. I first noticed the practice in the HBO version of The Golden Compass, where the book made no attempt to describe anyone as being of color, but years later the adaptation placed people of different races into roles that would have been assumed to be white.
I completely missed that Ming-Na Wen was Chun-Li in Street Fighter. For me she was the voice of Mulan who became a heartthrob action hero, at the age of 50, in Agents Of SHIELD, and has not dimmed one bit since.
A couple of things: When Big Bird leans over the counter, do we see the underwear of the puppeteer? It sure looks like it. And secondly, I don't think the painting is a nod to Ed Gein. It must be a reference to John Wayne Gacy who also doubled as a clown for children's parties.
Oh you're right, it's Gacy. I was thinking of Gein because I was just looking at some Psycho materials!
I didn’t know who he was until he was Gomez Addams, but I remember my parents knew of him, and my Mom was over the moon to see a hispanic playing the role. I watched the film, One From the Heart, this year and was stunned at what a sexy young man he was. I felt like I could see how one role led into the other.
Fascinating to see the eclectic career of Raul Julia. I admit, I only knew him from the Addams Family (a film which I still believe that was the best cast of any film I've ever seen - although I also agree that Cher as Morticia would have been interesting to say the least). Raul died the same year, 1994, as my absolute favorite childhood actor, John Candy - on whom a documentary was made which opened the Toronto Film Festival this year. While I was watching that doc, I couldn't help by wonder what projects John could have tackled, what other twists and turns his career would have taken him if he hadn't died so young. I now wonder that about Raul as well. And where in the hell did you dig up that clip of Ernest doing Shakespeare? That was seriously real? AI didn't come up with that in some techno fever-dream?
Yup, the Jim Varney clip is completely real! He was really trying to get away from that character for awhile, just like Joe Isuzu.
Now THAT might lure me over to Twitch. I remember seeing Overdrawn awhile back, when Netflix still mailed out disks, it was... weird. I cried when Raul Julia died, then went and watched Compromising Positions again.
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