Joe Mantegna
Joe Mantegna is an actor, born 1947.
Joe Mantegna, born in Chicago in 1947, has had two careers running in parallel for over thirty years. To one audience he is FBI agent David Rossi on Criminal Minds, a role he has played since 2007. To another he is Fat Tony, the Springfield mob boss he has voiced on The Simpsons since the 1991 episode "Bart the Murderer" and again in The Simpsons Movie.
The through line is delivery. Mantegna is the actor who can make a threat sound like a favour and a favour sound like a debt: even, unhurried, faintly amused, with the aggression sitting a full layer beneath the words. It is why Fat Tony is funny, because he plays the courtesy entirely straight and lets the situation supply the joke. It is also why Joey Zasa works in The Godfather Part III, where the character's driving quality is not swagger but resentment at not being taken seriously.
The film career runs from the tight, talk-driven crime pictures of the late eighties and early nineties, House of Games, Things Change and Homicide, through mainstream studio work such as Three Amigos, The Money Pit, Bugsy, Forget Paris and Up Close and Personal, to a genuinely tender turn as the chess prodigy's father in Searching for Bobby Fischer. He picked up Emmy nominations for three separate miniseries, The Last Don, The Rat Pack and The Starter Wife, and has produced and directed as well, including the 2000 film Lakeboat.
Movies (48)
- Cars 2 (2011)
- The Godfather Part III (1990)
- The Simpsons Movie (2007)
- Baby's Day Out (1994)
- ¡Three Amigos! (1986)
- Off Key (2001)
- Eye for an Eye (1996)
- The Money Pit (1986)
- Thinner (1996)
- Body of Evidence (1993)
- Airheads (1994)
- Celebrity (1998)
- Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)
- Nine Lives (2005)
- Bugsy (1991)
- Cougar Club (2007)
- Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)
- Redbelt (2008)
- Stories USA (2007)
- Suspect (1987)
- Up Close & Personal (1996)
- Albino Alligator (1997)
- Forget Paris (1995)
- My Suicide (2009)
- Homicide (1991)
- Elvis & Anabelle (2007)
- The Godfather Family: A Look Inside (1990)
- Alice (1990)
- Edmond (2006)
- Hotel Laguna (2001)
TV (11)
Where to start with Joe Mantegna
The fastest way in is The Godfather Part III, where Joey Zasa is preening and aggrieved and Mantegna plays the grievance rather than the swagger, which is what makes him dangerous.
Move next to House of Games, where a con artist's patter is the entire performance, and then Homicide, the least comfortable and probably the best thing on this list. Searching for Bobby Fischer is the warm counterweight, a father who cannot tell ambition from love. For the lighter side, ¡Three Amigos! and The Money Pit have him doing brisk, unfussy comic support.
Television is where most viewers actually know him. Criminal Minds is the steady late-career job and an easy watch in any order, while The Simpsons gives him Fat Tony, a mobster played with such impeccable manners that the jokes land twice as hard.