Staying Fit
Ray Romano always worries about the short shelf life of comedians, but at 65, his career keeps getting bigger. He makes his director-actor-cowriter debut with Somewhere in Queens (in theaters April 21), a funny, poignant dramedy about a squabbling, loving Italian family in New York, with The Conners star Laurie Metcalf, 67, as his breast-cancer survivor wife, and Jacob Ward as his shy high-school basketball star son, whose career and social life Romano’s dad character gets way too involved with. Romano tells AARP about his sort-of autobiographical movie and his winning streak as a grownup talent.
Actors used to panic after 60, but you got hit after hit: 'Get Shorty'; 'Made for Love'; a noncomic role in Martin Scorsese’s 'The Irishman'; and now you’re a director. What have your 60s been like for you?
Oh, I'm always in panic mode. But it's been very fast, these last five years. The day I turned 60, during The Irishman, I was sitting in a hotel room with Scorsese and Robert De Niro rehearsing a scene. They said, “How old are you?” And I made a face like I was I was upset — “Oh, I'm 60!” And they both looked at me and said, “Get the hell out of here!” Because they were both 74. I swear to you, that feels like it was last week. Amazing how fast it goes.
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'Somewhere in Queens' seems like a deeper dive into the world of 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' the 1996-2005 show inspired by your real life.
People comment that it's kind of the same ground as the sitcom, but in my opinion, it's nothing like that. I mean, the people in the world are similar. But the essence of it is something more real, more pointed. It's a different genre. As loud as this family is, and maybe stereotypical, we made sure that it was real. We didn't want to make cartoons out of these characters. There was going to be comedy in it, because it's hard for us to go three pages without putting something funny in it. But the goal was to write a drama.
So it's partly your life and partly an artist’s response, a story that you invented out of out of your life?
Yeah, I took elements of what I had lived through. The people, the neighborhood, the world I grew up in — you write what you know. Friendship, especially in this business, is tricky. I still have my friends that I had when I was growing up in Queens. After family, friends are the most important things you can have.
I did grab experiences from my own life. My son was a high-school basketball player who graduated and was done playing and it was very sad for me. And my wife was a breastcancer survivor. My kid has experienced social anxiety. It's all stuff I could tap into.
