For John Ortiz, “Promised Land” was the first chance he got to be a success without playing a drug dealer.
After decades on screen in “Carlito’s Way,” “Miami Vice” and “Fast & Furious,” Ortiz seemed locked into a cliche: the Latino man who busted heads for cash and worked his way up underground. “Promised Land,” which premiered Monday on ABC, gave him something different.
“It goes beyond the one or two types that predominantly covered Latino characters on the screen forever,” the 53-year-old Brooklyn, New York, native, whose father owned a bodega in Bedford-Stuyvesant, told the Daily News. “To me, what’s been painful about that is not that that doesn’t exist in the world, but that we are so much more than that. This type of scope, with this amount of characters, allows us to explore the story, explore our culture, in a non-monolithic way and to really be nuanced about it.
