'Super Mario Bros.' Turns 30: John Leguizamo on Bob Hoskins and Italian Accents in 1993 Movie (Flashback)
etonline.com. Following the success of, and the Chris Pratt-led animated adaptation’s billion-dollar payoff, it’s easy to forget that lower down on the box office leaderboard is Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo’s take on pop culture’s most famous plumbers.
When 31-year-old Leguizamo chatted with ET on the set, the fan discussions, including concerns about the character's voices, clearly echoed its 2023 counterpart. “We do a kind of New York, Italian thing,” the actor explained in 1992, demonstrating the dialect for ET’s cameras. “Not too strong.
We're not going for that New York talk. 'Let's talk coffee.' We're not doing that. We're doing more like 'Hey, how ya doing?
Talk to me.'«While there was plenty of discourse surrounding Pratt’s casting, Hoskins (who died in 2014) and Leguizamo, as they played on-camera siblings, faced similar skepticism. “I buy into us looking like brothers,” Leguizamo affirmed of the resemblance between him and the actor. “We've got the same little beady eyes.”When he landed the role, Leguizamo’s biggest connection to the video game canon was via Donkey Kong cabinets, noting that he spent a lot of time hanging out “at the arcades in New York City in Time Square” in his youth.
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