In an acting career that goes back to the early 1990s, John Ortiz has played fathers and sons, a pastor and an astronaut, drug addicts, cops, and drug-addicted cops. He has been directed by Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Ridley Scott, and Ron Howard. Sometimes if you blinked you missed him, but more often he held you fast to the screen.
If you liked Silver Linings Playbook or American Gangster or that perfect gem called The Drop, chances are you’re a fan of John Ortiz.
And yet, for all the breadth of projects Ortiz has tackled, he will confess that few have stuck to him longer than the HBO racetrack series Luck. (Full disclosure: This reporter was a staff writer on the show.)
For that single season of nine episodes airing between January and March of 2012, Ortiz was Turo Escalante, the flamboyant horse trainer who went toe-to-toe with a rival trainer played by Nick Nolte and the mob fixer played by Dustin Hoffman. When the series was cancelled, Ortiz quickly shed the trappings of the alpha-horseman to shape-shift into roles for the biopic Caesar Chavez and the Fox series Rake. But the residue of his total immersion in horseracing lingered, and to this day there is not a big event that goes by without Ortiz either tuning in or showing up to renew his love affair with the game.
Over the past year, Ortiz found himself in the same boat with millions of Americans whose personal and professional lives were drastically impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. His starring role in the mysterious HBO drama Messiah ran for ten episodes in early 2020, but the series was cancelled just as the pandemic began to spread. Film and television productions ground to a halt, leaving actors like Ortiz with nothing but time on their hands.
A racing fan can only spend so many quality hours with the family before they run screaming to the nearest racetrack, but neither Santa Anita nor Del Mar were allowing people in the stands, and not even Turo Escalante, with his made-for-TV trainer’s license, could have penetrated the health restrictions imposed on Southern California tracks.
Ortiz found his name summoned recently in obituaries and tributes marking the February 5 death from Covid-19 of trainer Julio Canani, who was the inspiration for the Escalante character as created by David Milch for Luck and brought to the screen by Michael Mann. Ortiz had been part of the Mann troupe in films such as Miami Vice and Public Enemies, but before he accepted the part in Luck he had never set foot on a racetrack, let alone wandered into the hidden corners of the backstretch.
For Ortiz, Canani’s death, at age 82, brought back vivid memories of time spent with his real-life counterpart in the trenches at Santa Anita, where Luck was filmed, and what he went through to bring an honest portrayal to the screen.
The actor began his education at Gulfstream Park in the company of John Perrotta, the former racetrack executive and racing stable manager who was engaged as a writer and consultant in the early stages of the production.
“David told me to get John’s feet wet on the backstretch,” Perrotta said. “So we spent some time with Allen Jerkens, which is really throwing a guy into the deep end. At the time I had a few horses with Joe Orseno. I told him to give John a horse to walk, some horse a kid could handle, just to give him the feel.”
Completely hooked
It did not take long for Ortiz to be both thoroughly disoriented and completely hooked.
“The more people I met, the more trainers I observed, I realized I was in a world apart from anything I’d ever experienced,” Ortiz said. “No two trainers did everything the same. The people on the backstretch were friendly and supportive of each other and at the same time not a part of the real world.
“After a while, it started to feel like the theatre world, kind of a self-contained existence where everybody has to rely on everybody else. But I knew I needed to know a whole lot more before I could even begin to be convincing as a hands-on horse trainer.”
The second act of his preparation came in Los Angeles, where Ortiz moved his family from New York for the Luck production and connected with Canani, who had trained 2001 Breeders’ Cup Mile winner Silic For Milch.
“I came out a month before filming started,” Ortiz said. “I knew I needed that time. The first day I was introduced to Julio he kind of gave me the eye and then pretty much ignored me. When I showed up the next morning at 5:30 he was surprised, but I kept coming out, watching how he handled his help and ran the barn. Pretty soon he says to me, ‘If you gonna be here every day, maybe you need a job.’ So he put me to work.”
Ortiz cleaned stalls, scrubbed tack, set feed tubs, swept tack room floors, raked the shed row, and listened, listened, listened. The ability of trained actors to absorb and learn quickly is remarkable, and Ortiz was calling on all his training to get under the skin of the Thoroughbred horse trainer. Especially this trainer.
A wink and a nod
Milch hung the character of Escalante on many of Canani’s biographical pegs. The native of Peru scuffled on the fringes of the Southern California sport for years before being entrusted with better and better horses. This reporter first encountered the trainer on the morning after he won the Oceanside Stakes on opening day of the 1975 Del Mar meet with a 7-year-old gelding named Willmar, a modestly accomplished refugee from Florida.
“He don’ sweat,” Canani said, the meaning of which was not immediately clear. Canani also was selling carrots to fellow trainers from the back of his car at the time.
“A non-sweater,” he explained, sort of. “Had to get out of Florida and come here where it’s cool.”
Willmar was Canani’s first stakes winner in a career that eventually rang up victories in a Santa Anita Handicap, three Breeders’ Cup events, and a championship for the 2-year-old filly Sweet Catomine, along with nearly every grass race worth winning on the West Coast.
Canani did it with a wink and a nod as if there was some deep secret to his success, when everyone knew – or at least should have known – that he was merely getting the best from the good horses he was given the chance to train.
Ortiz was faced with fathoming Canani’s cover story as the colorful Peruvian with a thousand racetrack tales whose relationship with the English language was fraught, often to entertaining effect.
Successful as well as vulnerable
“He would play the clown, but that’s not who he was,” Ortiz said. “He came from very poor roots. He was told ‘no’ most of his early life. And yet he had this incredible drive to be successful in something he found he was good at. I knew I was not going to be doing an imitation of Julio. But I wanted to be true to that inner drive that made him successful as well as vulnerable.”
Eventually, the trainer warmed to Ortiz and christened him with a nickname, the rough equivalent of a backstretch knighthood in Canani country.
“Yes, yes,” Ortiz recalled with a smile. “He called me ‘The Kid’, as in, ‘Can you believe this f---ing kid gonna play me on TV?’ So that was me, The F---ing Kid.
“And he would get into it,” Ortiz said. “I still spent a lot of time at his barn after we starting shooting the episodes – watching, learning, asking him questions. We’d talk maybe 60-40, English to Spanish, him with his Peruvian Spanish and me with my Brooklyn Puerto Rican.
“After the show started to air, he’d say to people with me standing there, ‘I’m the real Turo!’ At one point he started recommending that Turo should wear some of his clothes – the wild shirts, the hats, the shoes, the pants that were bright green and, I don’t know, flamingo? I had to draw the line. As I saw the character, Turo definitely had a different fashion sense than Julio.”
By the time Luck was rolling, Ortiz was growing more confident in his ability to embrace Escalante as his own man while maintaining the Canani influence. Escalante’s purposeful strut was not Canani’s more distracted, splay-footed amble. Escalante’s temper was quick, while Canani would do a righteous slow burn. They both, however, could feign angelic innocence at the cashing of a gamble, or try in vain to hide the sly anticipation of a race in the bag.
Ortiz was asked if he thought, by the end of his intense Luck experience, that he could pass the test for a trainer’s license.
“I think so,” he replied. “But I say that with the deepest respect for what trainers do. Their dedication to their horses and the people who work for them is remarkable. I was constantly reminded of people in show business who, if they don’t have each other, they’ve got nobody.”
Luck was cancelled by HBO after shooting the first episode of the second season. The official reason was the accidental death of a third company horse over the nearly two years of production. Other versions exist, but don’t really matter, and for Ortiz, the flame of racing continued to burn. He became a celebrity ambassador for the Breeders’ Cup and has attended periodic reunions of the Luck cast, hosted by Perrotta.
In the meantime, as restrictions on production eased, Ortiz returned to work late last summer with an independent movie called TheFallout that is scheduled to premier next month at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas. He’s also preparing to shoot a studio movie, and he holds out a fond wish to be in a crowd at Del Mar later this year for the Breeders’ Cup championship events.
“I miss racing so much,” he said. “I think the last time I was able to go was the Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita.”
For the loyal cohort of Luck fans, their final image of Turo Escalante was in Episode 9 at the hospital bedside of the veterinarian played by Jill Hennessy, of Law & Order fame. He has just won the biggest race of the season at Santa Anita and has brought her flowers from the winner’s circle. She has just suffered a miscarriage of their child and must tell him the awful news. His final line of the show is a forlorn, “Madre Dio.” He climbs in beside her, and the camera lingers on Turo’s face as they embrace.
Last real goodbye
For Julio Canani, the ending had far more tragedy than poignant romance. By the time Ortiz and Escalante came into his life, the trainer’s career already was on a downward trend. Stakes-quality horses had become rare. In 2014, his last full year of training, the stable earned barely half a million dollars. The following year his license was suspended by the California Horse Racing Board after he was found guilty of defrauding an owner in the purchase and resale of horses.
Canani never regained his license to train, although he eventually was allowed access to the racetrack. He also began showing symptoms of dementia.
“It was a couple of years ago when I saw him for the last time,” Ortiz said. “I was at Santa Anita, at Clocker’s Corner, just visiting. I looked over when someone said, ‘There’s Julio,’ and he was sitting by himself. I gave him a hug, but he had that look in his eye that told me he really wasn’t present. I reminded him who I was and he smiled, but I know he just couldn’t bring back the memory.
“I prefer to think of our last real goodbye happening not long after Luck ended,” Ortiz said. “We’d done a photo shoot to promote the show, and Julio insisted that I wear one of his furry Russian hats for the pictures. So I did, and as a gift of appreciation I had one of them blown up so he could hang it on his office wall alongside all the other photos that told so many great stories.
“He never showed a lot of real emotion with me,” Ortiz said. “He was pretty guarded that way. But the picture really affected him. I thought it would be enough to just sign my name, but he said, ‘No, you got to write something.’ So I thought for a few minutes and then wrote, ‘Sin ti, no hay Turo,’” Ortiz said. “’Without you, there’s no Turo.’
“He read it, and he was very quiet, then he walked out of his office and headed down the road,” Ortiz said. “I followed after a few minutes and found him putting the photo in his car. ‘You’re not hanging that in the office,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This one – this one goes home with me.’”