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.
“The weight of feeling like you have to represent it all with one character, which has been the pattern for many years, has been relieved. No one has the burden of representing the whole scope of Latino culture.”
Ortiz stars as Joe Sandoval, the patriarch of a Latino family and magnate of a California vineyard desperate to keep a handle on both his children and his company. The show is bursting with soapy drama, from Sandoval’s ex-wife (Bellamy Young), the sole descendant of the winery’s founder, to his new blended family and five children, all fighting for his legacy.
“You see both the beauty of chasing your dreams, especially when the prizes do come, but also the cost of it,” Ortiz said.
“He’s at a point where the mountain he’s built, a beautiful mountain, is not only starting to crumble but he’s now faced with the fact that he might have become a different person on more than one level and he’s forced to be confronted with that truth.”
Intermingled is a second timeline, about three immigrants who cross the wall and make their way to that same winery, attempting to build a life for themselves.
Creator Matt Lopez, a third-generation American, got the idea at Home Depot, watching a group of day laborers waiting for someone to need them.
“I had this cathartic epiphany moment where their lives seemed so different than mine, but really the only difference is the passage of time. My grandparents and great-grandparents worked in fields, worked in factories,” he told The News.
“Promised Land,” he said, is the immigrant story at two different places on the journey: “the family empire at the height of its power and the scrappy immigrant story of how the empire came to be.”
Young, who plays Margaret Honeycroft, the winery heir and Joe’s ex-wife who returns with vengeance on her mind, called it a story of the American Dream working.
“You can really put your life on the line and wind up in a castle on the hill,” she said.
In a way, Margaret serves as the villain, setting out to take down Joe and his family. But she’s also trying to reclaim the company that she feels is hers.
“She starts again in a whole new industry and becomes a titan, so as much as she’s coming home for revenge … she’s also coming home a very changed person and able to be in her own skin in her own home. She knows who she is now and she has nothing left to prove to anyone,” Young, 51, told The News.
On a whim, Lopez sent a letter to Bruce Springsteen, asking to use one of his songs in the “Promised Land” pilot. Springsteen gave him “Born in the U.S.A.”
“Using this very American song, by perhaps the quintessential American recording artist, the idea I liked was taking ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and reclaiming it on behalf of millions of Americans who are not born in the U.S.A. but are reborn in the U.S.A.,” Lopez told The News.
“I think for millions of Americans who emigrate here, they embody the American dream as well if not better than Americans whose families have been here for generations.”
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