'Being Latin is a superpower': John Leguizamo promotes new MSNBC show at SXSW

In case you thought John Leguizamo has mellowed after four decades of working in entertainment, think again: He’s still angry and he’s still fighting.

He believes Latinos are still vastly underrepresented in Hollywood and he continues to complain about not getting better roles and the culture not getting its due.

“I am a complainer and I like to complain. You can’t be a New Yorker and not complain,” he said at a Tuesday panel at South by Southwest.

He’s also celebrating, though, with the show he was here to promote, “Leguizamo Does America,” a six-episode MSNBC documentary series that will focus on the cultural impact of Latinos in ways its creators say will be done in unconventional, deep-digging ways.

The show debuts April 16 and will stream on Peacock. Leguizamo was joined on the panel by showrunner Carolina Saavedra, director Ben DeJesus and moderator Tom Llamas from NBC News.

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DeJesus previously documented some of Leguizamo’s work for PBS.

The actor and show host, who recently appeared in “The Menu” and will be on Amazon’s upcoming “The Power,” traveled for six weeks last summer to Los Angeles, Puerto Rico, and lots of other locations to tell stories about up-and-coming Latino artists, activists and established cultural figures.

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One of them is a local favorite: In a clip shown to the audience, Leguizamo interviews filmmaker Robert Rodriguez in Los Angeles about the making of his first film, “El Mariachi,” before the director hopped on a plane back to Austin.

The creation of the show sounds like a labor of love for the creators, who said that audiences can expect Leguizamo’s sense of humor to shine through in interviews and segments that will be more than a celebrity-driven travelogue.

Leguizamo called it a show about Latin exceptionalism. “What we’ve survived in this country, it proves that being Latin is a superpower. Our wealth has been stolen, we have been deported, but we keep coming back and we keep rebuilding. We add $2.8 trillion to the U.S. economy. If we were a country, we’d be the 5th-biggest in the world,” he said.

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Leguizamo is still angry about how little Latinos are represented in entertainment; he takes is personally after getting rejections throughout his career and having to make his own material, such as the one-man shows like “Mambo Mouth” that launched his career.

“We’re 20 percent of the population, we’re 1 percent of protagonists in entertainment, 1 percent of executives. The representation is unacceptable,” Leguizamo said. “I’m already four decades in, when is it gonna change? We need to be boycotting, protesting, picketing.”

An audience member asked about the surprise animated hit “Encanto,” which featured Leguizamo. Leguizamo pointed out that it’s another example of how even Disney wasn’t able to predict the huge appetite for a Latino story that would make it so successful.

It was a running theme of the panel that Leguizamo and these filmmakers are trying to open doors and educate about Latino artists and creators. When discussing the early shows that Leguizamo created for himself, he got emotional.

“I was doing it for kids like me,” he said, his voice breaking. “I wanted them to feel seen.”