In a different world, Edward James Olmos would be thought of more often. A better world. Of course, there’s also a world where he was a catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers and one where his band Pacific Ocean actually was, as the joke went, the biggest thing on the West Coast. I don’t care about baseball, and I’ve never heard the band, so I don’t know anything about those worlds, but they are both missing performances by a fine actor—and, to my understanding, some really quality movies that he herded through production in order to get more Hispanic representation.
I’m old enough so that, in theory, I first knew him from Miami Vice; certainly I remember the excitement that the show featured a Hispanic guy as something other than, say, a Cuban drug dealer getting arrested by Don Johnson. One closing in on middle age, too, and not as excitingly fresh and attractive as Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. And I did see a couple of episodes of it in its initial run, when I would spend the night away from home with a woman who’d let me stay up all night watching TV if I wanted to. I haven’t seen it since, though, and I remember almost nothing about it. I have more memory of the dialogue surrounding the show than the show itself.
No, when I picture Olmos, I picture him as Los Angeles calculus teacher Jaime Escalante, who he actually somewhat physically resembles. (I remember it as being when he took off a toupee, but IMDb says he had his hair thinned for the role. Not that I know how you do that.) It’s a stirring film with some historical quibbles—though no one seems to agree on how many. Anyway, it’s another one of those movies that I quote routinely as a pop culture reference that no one gets, but since it’s not one of his lines that I quote, never mind.
The point is that I think he prefers roles that could be gathered together as “inspirational Hispanic mentor type.” I’m not a Galactica fan, so someone else will have to say if it’s a role he plays there, but he also plays “patriarch,” so I guess that’s an option, as is “dynamic leader.” He’s had a steady career, possibly one of the best of any Hispanic character actor of his generation, to the point that he’s a Hispanic character actor whose name people stand a chance of knowing.
Honestly, he’s one of those people that made it to the list because I thought they were worth talking about but about whom I did not have much specific to say. He’s talented, and he did a movie I love, and not enough people talk about him. Maybe I’d have more to say if I liked Galactica more. Or Miami Vice.