Blame Sylvia Torres. Or thank her.
Because in 1997, she told her son’s best friend, Michael, to go to an open casting call being held in Chicago.
“I was 19, and I was working at a bank at the time. And I said, no,” Michael Peña said on the phone. “Then she told me to go to another. I was like ‘OK, OK.’ I’ll go just to shut her up.”
Somehow we doubt she’s holding her tongue.
Last year, Peña owned some of the most moving moments in arguably the best 9/11 movie to date. And that film wasn’t even about the attacks that took place nearly five years ago.
“Crash” just took our colliding, collective emotions, our careening ethnic identities, and our astonished grief and made a telling, timely allegory about stories slamming against each other.
In that cast of painfully human, often bigoted characters, Peña played the least tarnished of Angelenos. A locksmith by trade, he was a young father whose daughter believed too well in his sweet fable of an invisible, bullet-defying cape.
This week, the 29-year-old grabs tight the reins of his first lead role, in “World Trade Center,” which opened Wednesday.
Directed by Oliver Stone and written by newcomer Andrea Berloff, the movie focuses on two Port Authority police officers trapped beneath the rubble when Tower Two collapsed.
Peña plays rookie officer Will Jimeno opposite Nicolas Cage’s John McLouglin, a veteran who responded to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Though Peña had a steady stream of small-screen appearances (“The Shield,” “CSI,” “ER”), “Crash” made him a “Hey, who’s the guy?” revelation.
“When I did ‘Crash,’ to be honest with you, it was just another acting job. I just wanted to do as good as I possibly could,” Peña said on the phone from Dallas, where he was doing a mini- press junket.
“Within two months, Oliver Stone gave me a call and he wanted me to look at the script.”
“Crash” made audiences aware of Peña’s potential, but the actor locates his own turning point five years earlier. That’s when, he says, he “started to get comfortable, to learn how to act.”
That’s the year he got a Steven Spielberg pilot (“Semper Fi”). He also booked “Buffalo Soldiers,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Ed Harris.
“After that, I was in a movie with Don Cheadle and Kevin Spacey (“The United States of Leland” by Colorado-born Matthew Ryan Hoge).
Like Peña’s character in “Crash,” Jimeno, too, is a young father. Wife Allison is pregnant with their second daughter when Jimeno and McLoughlin go missing in the rubble.
A story of two families under duress, “World Trade Center” is founded on crafted, sturdy ensemble work. Peña plays well off of Cage. His young officer tosses pop-culture questions at the trivia-clueless, exhausted vet. (Did you see “G.I. Jane?” he asks before relating a memorable quote about the importance of pain.) And they swap stories about their wives.
Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal play Donna McLouglin and Allison Jimeno. They keep it together because it’s in the unwritten but understood pre-nuptial agreement for mates of first-responders.
From the time Peña signed on to the movie, he had help from the man whose harrowing confinement he would be depicting – Will Jimeno.
“I lived with his family for a week,” said Peña. In fact, when he called, he and Gyllenhaal were traveling alongside Will and Allison Jimeno. (Cage and Bello would be doing a similar press run with John and Donna McLouglin).
After a week, the actor wanted more. He couldn’t quite understand how someone could remain so positive. “So I went up for a weekend, and then another weekend and another weekend during rehearsals.”
For his part, Jimeno tried to get the young actor to tap into times when he’d been courageous. “To prove to me I can do it,” said Peña.
So what did he dig up?
“As a kid growing up in Chicago, I’ve been shot at before. I remember I very calmly went down on the ground. Afterwards you’re like ‘Omigod.’ You just don’t have time to think. That’s the sort of thing Will embodies. He goes on instinct. He doesn’t edit his honesty.”
Does Peña remember – and who doesn’t? – where he was on that rending day in 2001?
“I was at the house of my then girlfriend,” he said.
“We got a phone call, and we looked at the television. I remember wanting to go to a friend’s house, needing to be at a friend’s house. On that day you had that feeling you should be around people, and that is exactly what we did.”
He paused.
“And that’s what this movie’s about in a sense,” he said. “World Trade Center” takes back heart where heartlessness struck.
“I like the fact that it focuses on the right thing.”
