CHICAGO — “Criminal Minds” may have wrapped its 15 season run on CBS in 2020, but the procedural is back — with new episodes, a new home on Paramount+ and a new name: “Criminal Minds: Evolution.” Star Joe Mantegna, who plays FBI Special Agent David Rossi, described the process of reacclimating with the role as akin to “seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for two-and-a-half years. I thought we’d never see him again — it’s like he was off to the jungle, never to come back, and then he parts the trees and it’s like, oh wow, there’s that guy again.”
Outside of Fat Tony, a character he’s played on “The Simpsons” for three decades, David Rossi is his longest-running gig. Before that, Mantegna had mostly done theater and film work. But he got a helpful piece of advice when he started doing TV: “Try to find things within the character that are apropos to you, because you will possibly be playing this role for years, so you might as well tap into the aspects of Joe Mantegna that are within this character ... so it’s nice to have David Rossi as part of my life again because he already was, in many ways.”
A Chicago native, Mantegna’s career began on the Chicago stage. When asked about a worst moment, it was a 1984 performance at the Goodman Theatre of “Glengarry Glen Ross” that was seared in his memory.
Ironically, the story also involves William Petersen, who shared his version of this same night for a column about his own worst moment.
Here’s that story from Mantegna’s point of view.
My worst moment …
“You have to understand, I was living in Los Angeles at the time, banging around, doing what I’ve always done. I’ve been a professional actor since 1969 when I did the play ‘Hair’ in Chicago at the Shubert Theater and then I did ‘Godspell’ at the Studebaker Theater and I was thinking: Oh, this is going to be my career, I’m going to be a musical comedy guy.
“And then I got attached to the Organic Theater out of Chicago, working with Stuart Gordon for five years, and that’s where I conceived of ‘Bleacher Bums,’ which was the last show I did at the Organic. So then I went back to a musical, I did Studs Terkel’s ‘Working’ on Broadway, so I thought: OK, I’m back in that vein.
“After I did that, winter was coming and I looked at my wife and said, ‘I’m 30 years old, let’s try California. I can’t face another Chicago winter.’ (Laughs) OK, let’s give L.A. a shot. So I came out here and I’m doing little bits on sitcoms and drama shows, and I get a call from my dear friend David Mamet, who I had worked with several times in Chicago, saying, ‘Hey Joe, I’ve got this new play.’
“He sends me the play. I read it and I don’t understand half of it because it was about real estate and I’d never lived in a house in my entire life. So I’m reading about leads and I’m like, I don’t know what the hell this is about! So I call up my relatives, who were bricklayers, and they explained to me some of this stuff so I could make some heads or tails of what this character was talking about. And it was typical Dave, it’s deep and the language is so rich.
“So jump cut, we’re in Chicago doing rehearsals at the Goodman. If all goes well, we would take it to New York. We’re doing the previews and I still don’t have it 100% in my head what this was all about, but it seems to be working.
“So it’s opening night, the end of Act 1, myself and Bill Petersen as Ricky Roma and James Lingk. And basically, for me, it’s a five or six-minute monologue, and Bill’s character is basically saying ‘uh-huh’ and ‘yeah,’ which is typical of Mamet. This takes place in a Chinese restaurant.
“Opening night in Chicago, everybody who’s anybody is in the audience, including Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.
“So I start my monologue. And about a minute into it, the actor’s nightmare hits me. For whatever reason — which I couldn’t tell you if I spent a year thinking about it — all of a sudden I realized I had no idea not only what the next line was, what the next anything was. Just gone.
“And I look out in the audience and I see all these faces and I think: OK, this is odd. Then I look at Bill. And poor Bill! There’s nothing he can do for me. And he’s vibrating. I could see he’s breaking out into a sweat because he’s so concerned for me, because of course he knows what’s happened.
“Time is going by and I’m thinking, well everybody must know what’s happening. And then I can hear the stage manager from backstage yelling the next line! And I’m thinking: Well, this is really something, it’s opening night and a guy is yelling my lines. And it’s not helping!
“But I got real relaxed. And looked at Bill. And all I wanted to do was reach over and grab his arm and say, ‘Bill, it’s OK — it’s only a play.’ But of course, I didn’t do that.
“Probably 40 seconds to a minute had passed and I’m thinking, I better do something. Because the audience is frozen. Like, whooooa. But I thought to myself: I do know what the last two lines of the scene are. I guess I better just jump to that.
“So I jumped to: ‘Hi, my name is Ricky Roma. What’s yours?’ And that’s it, curtain, boom, intermission.
“And I think: OK, I’ve had a good career. This is it. It’s all over. It’s a helluva way to go out, but I’m outta here.
“So I walk offstage and now I start vibrating, which I should have been doing on stage, but no, I was calm until I finished. Then it hit me.
“But I gotta say, Mamet came running up to me, he grabs me and he goes, ‘I love you, man.’ Greg Mosher, the director, came up and said basically the same thing. Lindsay Crouse, David’s wife at the time, came up and hugged me. They all knew. The empathy was incredible.
“And I sat in my dressing room contemplating: Well, maybe it’s not too late to try out for the Chicago Cubs or become a forest ranger. But I thought to myself: I do have to do Act 2. So I’m gonna burn that up — they’re going to at least remember this Act 2. And Act 2 was probably 30 or 40 seconds shorter than normal because I was on fire. I mean, I didn’t miss a word! I was pissed, which worked for the character.
“So the next day Mamet and Mosher call me and say, ‘We’d like to take you to lunch.’ And they couldn’t have been sweeter or nicer, but they were like: What can we do? How can we help you? Because now they’re worried that something’s going on. And I said, ‘Look, there’s nothing you can do. It’s on me. I have to do more prep.’ So I go back to the hotel and I work on that speech. I write it freehand — that’s a little technique; you take a paper and a pen and you write out your lines as if you’re writing a book. I know this thing backward and forward.
“Anyway, we finish the run in Chicago. We go to New York and I’m still nervous, what if this rears its ugly head again? But then I also go: Joe, step up to the plate. You’ve been an actor for how many years now? You started in ‘69 and now it’s ‘84 — let’s get real.
“So opening night comes, I say a little novena in my dressing room, I go on stage, I get through it and in fact, there’s a bit of applause during part of the speech. That’s good!
“Next thing I know, about a month later the show wins the Pulitzer Prize. And then I get a knock on my door — we were subletting an apartment with our dear friend from Cordis Fejer, who was a member of the Organic Theater at the time; this is John Heard’s sister — and someone comes to the door and it’s a guy with a little shopping bag and he says: ‘This is your nomination for the Antoinette Perry Tony Awards.’
“And that was probably more exciting than when I won the Tony. Because at that moment I thought to myself: Oh my god, I had the most terrible moment I could have as an actor on stage during the opening night of a play — and that play has now won the Pulitzer Prize and now they’re handing me this little shopping bag with the symbol of the Tony’s on it with a card that says I’ve been nominated.
“It went from the most terrible moment in my life to me being nominated for it!
“Cut to the Tony’s. The other guys who are nominated are 10 or 15 years older than I am and I’m thinking, they’re not going to give it to the young guy. And then boom, my name gets called, and there I am holding this Tony award, I was so nervous. And I thanked all the men of ‘Glengarry’ and the three women: My wife, Cordis, who gave us a place to stay, and my mother — who didn’t even know what a Tony award was; she would tell her friends later that ‘Joey won the Oscar for the plays.’
“I’ve spoken now to different theater groups and schools and I’ll tell this story as a way to show students that you can sometimes turn the worst moment you’ve ever had into your greatest triumph.
“You have to put in the work. Don’t assume you’ll figure it out later. No, you have to be on top of your game right from the jump. Because then if something goes wrong, you can at least say, ‘I gave it my all.’”
When the stage manager yelled out the lines, why wasn’t that helpful?
“I was so deep and gone — just lost. In fact, I wanted to yell back: ‘Don’t waste your breath, it’s not helping!’
“And you can’t improvise your way out of it. Improvising David Mamet is like improvising Shakespeare. That’s the thing about David’s writing, it’s so specific.”
The takeaway …
“That was the lowest point in my career in terms of self-failure. And I was able to turn it into one of my most triumphant moments as an actor. To be able to say that, I feel so blessed. Not that winning the Tony is the most important thing, but the acknowledgment of taking something from the lowest point to people saying, ‘You know what? What you’re doing is pretty good.’
“If that can happen to me, that can happen to anyone. So never discount your lowest moment.
“I think I stayed calm in that moment because it’s a little of my mother in me. Nothing really bothered her. She lived to be 101 years old.
“And when she passed away, this is a funny anecdote, my brother spoke first at her funeral. And he said: ‘When Joey got the show ‘Criminal Minds,’ our mother called and said, ‘Ronnie, I’m worried about Joey — he’s only working an hour a week.’
“She knew I had done movies and plays but she never quite figured it out, all she knew was people would tell her: ‘Turn on Channel 2 every Wednesday at 9 o’clock and you’ll see Joey.’ And she thought, how can he be making a living only working from 9 to 10 every Wednesday? And my brother had to tell her, ‘No, he’s all right. Don’t worry about that’ (laughs).”
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