Traffic's Luis Guzman, a NYC Character Actor

Luis Guzman's career began with an act of effrontery.

The veteran character actor describes himself as "a problem child"?a macho Lower East Side street kid who had attitude and was proud of it. One day, while wandering the halls of his school, he peeked into a classroom and saw his gym teacher auditioning students for a production of Bye-Bye Birdie.

"I walked in on the auditions and said, 'Dude, you can't even run a gym class?how you gonna direct a play?' He threw the script at me and said, 'Well, then, let's see what you can do.'"

Guzman's punishment was to play Mr. McAfee in the musical?which, in retrospect, was no punishment at all.

Twenty-some years later, Guzman is one of the most heavily employed supporting actors in American cinema?one of those rare souls who can be relied on to make good films better and bad films bearable. Following his screen debut in the prison drama Short Eyes, he appeared in countless films, most of them with a street flavor: Michael Mann's influential cop show Miami Vice, Sidney Lumet's brutal police corruption thriller Q&A, the heroin drama Jumpin' at the Boneyard, plus The Hard Way, Carlito's Way and many others.

"I've paid my dues," he says. "I don't just mean I've worked my way up. Early on, I was getting blown away, I was a drug dealer, I was a rapist. But I kept on with it. Other roles started happening and I wasn't being stereotyped so much."

Among those roles: the unlikely porno costar and nightclub owner in Boogie Nights; the crossdressing escaped convict in Out of Sight; and the ex-con turned acting student in The Limey, who played Sancho Panza to Terence Stamp's vengeful Don Quixote. He can currently be seen onscreen in Steven Soderbergh's drug epic Traffic, as a droll DEA agent partnered with frequent costar Don Cheadle.

Last year, Guzman acted in an astounding eight movies, plus a stint on HBO's Oz. One of these is the upcoming The Count of Monte Cristo, in which he plays Jacopo, the Count's right-hand man.

"They could have gotten some theater-trained actor from England for that role," he says. "But they got me. I guess they figured it could work."

Guzman had his doubts.

"But then they outfitted me for my costume, and I looked in the mirror and I'm like, 'Holyyyy shit! Look at me! A kid from the neighborhood, and I'm in period!'"

The transformation was a long time coming. He was born in Puerto Rico and spent his early years in the West Village; when he was nine, his family moved to the Lower East Side. His mother was a factory worker and his father was a tv repairman. In his twenties, he performed street theater and studied the Meisner technique. But he kept his day job as a counselor for at-risk youth.

The work was hard, and often heartbreaking. But Guzman was good at it. He did it for 14 years, even after he'd amassed credits in major movies.

He stopped in 1991, after good notices for his breakthrough performance as a cop in Q&A and the tragic death of his first son in a malpractice incident, which "made it impossible for me to just go back to work. I felt it was time to make a change."

He still misses counseling sometimes. Though he lives with his wife, three daughters and two sons on a country estate in Vermont?"I didn't want my kids to grow up in this city, five kids in an apartment"?he still returns to New York three or four times a year to speak to young people. He stresses the importance of getting an education, learning a trade and "taking care of business."

"To me, that wasn't just a job. It was where I came from. I used to walk around with my paycheck in my back pocket for two weeks because that wasn't what mattered to me. What mattered to me was that I was helping people help themselves."

As Guzman talks about his work as a counselor, his eyes narrow and his voice lowers to a deadly serious whisper. It's like he's slipping into character again. His face is both reproachful and optimistic?like he's expecting the best while warning you against the worst.

"I was hardass on 'em. These were tough kids. Challenging. I'd have to tell them, 'Listen, you can't take that attitude to work, because nobody will want to deal with you.' I wanted to teach them how the real world works. I said, 'Nobody's gonna feel sorry for you because you dropped out of school, you have a kid, you don't have a place to live. You want to prove to yourself that you can hold down a job and learn a skill.'"

It was not an easy sell.

"In that job, you gotta deal with the whole drug trade. Back then, that was a large part of what I was competing against. I was competing against a drug dealer who would say to a kid, 'Listen, you can make 50 dollars a day, or 50 dollars an hour, if you just stand on the corner and yell out when you see a cop coming onto the block.'

"What I used to say to these young kids is, 'Have you ever met a drug dealer who's on a pension, who's retired? What's the reality? Say you do it for a while, you don't die or go to jail, and you give it up. Now you're 25, 26, 27 years old, and you have no employment record. When you're that age, you should be working on finishing your college degree. Or getting close to becoming a master carpenter. Or working as a paralegal. Or a supervisor. Or running your own business. You should have your own apartment, you should be taking care of a baby, you should have responsibilities. You should be a role model for other people.'"

Guzman knows that part of what makes him so employable as an actor is the sense that he's a real New Yorker with a street-tough past?someone who plays characters, but also has character. He calls his past life as a counselor "part of the reason I'm doing this today. Just dealing with all those kids, all those lives, all these stories." So when he's asked to play someone on the fringes of society?someone who protects or breaks the law, someone who can be tough or violent?he doesn't have to imagine very hard.

"I don't have to make a leap to become such a person. For all intents and purposes, I already am that person. I carry the records around inside of me. My experience enables me to project a reality. And I love projecting reality."