Michael Peña was five years into his career when his then-manager called him into her office one day. “You’re not funny, Mike,” she said. “That’s what I’m hearing.” Even from this distance, more than a decade later, the actor is prone to give a small, sad shake of the head at that story. “Maybe I really wasn’t,” he says softly. “I don’t think she was being mean.” An upwards inflection at the end of the sentence leaves the point moot.
It is worth recalling the words of that manager while watching Ant-Man, an oddball addition to the Marvel movie stable. Paul Rudd plays the hero, who has access to a serum that enables him to shrink to insect-size while retaining enormous reserves of strength. But it is Peña, as his hyperactive chum Luis, full of plots and plans and snappy talk, who brings the house down. His comic timing is effortless but precise. He can make a line uproarious simply by accelerating his delivery, or modulate the laugh by leaving an extra beat before responding.
When I last met Peña three years ago, he seemed reserved and defensive, with little of his on-screen warmth. End of Watch, the film he was promoting back then, had been gruelling to make, as is customary with any macho David Ayer action movie. (Peña also starred in the director’s recent tank-bound second world war drama Fury.) And it had taken a while for the actor to establish a rapport with his co-star Jake Gyllenhaal on set, to whom he referred during our interview as “that guy”, gesturing at the End of Watch poster with his thumb.
Put his improved mood today down to the more escapist slant of Ant-Man, a smoother relationship with his co-star this time around or simply an upswing in his own fortunes. (He has a stack of high-profile movies in production including Ridley Scott’s The Martian and a big-screen version, à la 21 Jump Street, of the old TV cop show CHiPs.) He is 39, with a lightly padded, lazily boyish face, and a moustache-and-goatee combo in boot-polish black. He is dressed in a grey shirt, black trousers and dark blue suede shoes; he swings his legs up in front of him on the chaise longue so that he is sitting almost in profile. But look at the socks: stripy, silly, multicoloured. They’re the socks you put on when things are going your way.
Of course, Ant-Man has had its share of troubles. Peña signed up for the film because he was eager to work with its director and co-writer, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz). “His films have their own way of being. Their own life. It was a no-brainer.” But Wright walked away from the project immediately prior to shooting when creative differences emerged between him and Marvel executives. “Movies go from one person to another,” says Peña with a “what-can-you-do?” shrug. “It still feels to me like an Edgar movie at its core.”
The picture’s comic energy is most abundantly in evidence whenever Rudd and Peña are together on screen: the former is laconic; the latter fizzing and sparking like a human catherine wheel. “That wasn’t how the character started out,” he tells me. “He was more like me at first.” Easygoing, that is. Softly spoken. Smouldering. “But that wasn’t working. Paul and I realised it would be cool to play up the Abbott-and-Costello, Laurel-and-Hardy kinda thing. Focus on the opposites.” When I remark that their double act works a treat, he looks disproportionately thrilled. “Oh yeah? Right on, brother!”
He beckons me over, pulls out his mobile phone and shows me a video of the man on whom he based Luis: a friend-of-a-friend named Pablo. I watch Pablo holding court at a barbecue, filling the gaps between words with superfluous chirrups, like a child colouring right to the edges of the page. His hands carve crazy shapes in the air as he babbles. That’s Luis alright. How did Pablo receive the news that he had been immortalised in a Marvel movie? “He was, like, ‘Oh that’s cool, that’s cool, man, so basically, yeah, wassup-wassup-wassup …’ He doesn’t care. He’s got his own life.”
It isn’t the first time Peña has modelled a character on a real person. The drawling, slow-motion goofiness of the millionaire baseball-team owner he played in the HBO series Eastbound & Down was inspired by a man he met while on a cruise with his wife and their six-year-old son. “This guy looked like he had a lot of money. He was all, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, isss cool, isss cool …’” The shopping mall security guard in Observe and Report, with his bling and his perm, was written as African-American; Peña, the son of Mexican immigrants, thought it would be funnier if he played it as though he thought he were black. “I saw this little guy in a documentary about pimps. He was saying, ‘Man, you gots to love yo beeches …’ I thought, that’s him. That’s the character.’” He prefers to work that way, he says, from the outside in. “What’s funny isn’t really me. What I do is point out what I find funny in others.”
Either way, it’s Peña getting the laughs. He can switch in a flash to sombre drama – he has played two fathers hit by the death of their child, first in the Oscar-winning Crash, then in Gracepoint, the US remake of Broadchurch. He was also bravely undemonstrative in his only leading role to date, as the labour leader and activist Cesar Chavez in the biopic of the same name. But throw in roles such as the fake sheikh in American Hustle and a disgruntled elevator man taking revenge on his Bernie Madoff-style boss in Tower Heist, and that’s a lot of comedy for someone who isn’t funny. Did he hear his manager’s put-down as a challenge?
“I think I did. I decided to go away and work on it and find a way in.” That’s his style. “I remember my seventh-grade chemistry teacher told me I’d never amount to anything. I thought, ‘Hmm. OK.’ That gave me motivation to prove her wrong. I had to work hard because high school was crowded. Getting special attention was difficult.” He moved schools a lot in Chicago – I make it 12. “Twelve? Let me see … St Catherine … St Nicks … Hubbard …” I sit there while he sweetly counts out his schools on his fingers. “Ten!” he says with a triumphant laugh. “But that’s still a lot.” Why so many? “Well, at one school, there was this nun who thought I was a smart-ass because I was always done with my work early. She kept giving me Cs even when I got 100%. Mum took me out of that school.” And the others? “She just kept moving me,” he says, sounding a touch bewildered.
He queries my description of his childhood neighbourhoods as “tough”. “They weren’t really tough. Just poor. There was a lot of gang stuff. I saw people die right in front of me. It’s normal when it’s all you know. I didn’t realise I lived in the ghetto until we moved out.” Ten years ago, he went back there with an ex-girlfriend. “I was telling her, ‘I’ve lived some tough shit. It was totally rad.’ But it had all been gentrified. “She was, like, ‘Oh yeah? Were the lines real long at the coffee shop?’”
Peña managed to resist the gangs. (“I’m not a good follower.”) Acting got him out of Chicago, but it wasn’t anything as exalted as a calling. He did it for the money. His mother was ill so he started going up for auditions. “I tried to pay for her care, but I only became successful after she passed away.”
It wasn’t until a few years ago that he started owning up to the real reason he started acting. “I went into this thing ass-backwards. Instead of loving it and then getting paid, I got paid and then loved it. I started checking out great movies. I must’ve seen A Streetcar Named Desire 100 times. I want to be a part of things of that calibre. I want to leave a good impression.” That one is safely in the bag. But he still has ambitions left to fulfil. Last time we met, he was wishing that someone would cast him as the lead in a romantic comedy. He’s still waiting. “I think that could be cool. I could be a regular guy who’s just funny.” He thinks for a moment. “When Juan Met Sally? Something like that?”
Ant-Man is released on Friday.
