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"I love my kids. I'm gonna raise them a lot different than my parents raised me—because my parentsdamaged me. I love them for that, because it made me who I am today. But my kids don't need to bethat successful." It's a quintessential John Leguizamo riff—and it's true, besides. The 40-year-old actor-comedian has in fact been strikingly successful. With more than 50 films to his credit, he's played everything from asex-obsessed disco prince (Summer of Sam) to an ambitious anchorman inCronicas, a morally ambiguous film about aserial killer. But Leguizamo is beloved for his one-man shows, several of which were made into HBO comedy specials, and one of which,Freak, won an Emmy. The monologues are frank about heartbreak, sex, racial suspicion, sex, being a teenage loser, sex, the pain of divorce and sex, but Leguizamo's real power is in his physical presence. He struts the stage in tight jeans, tattoo and Queens-bred attitude, radiating a kinetic mix ofhumor and vulgarity, offending and charming in the same breath. It's amazing what he can get away with. The core of his act is over-the-top impersonations: his king-of-the-hill grandfather, his squabbling parents and the various women he's chased, bedded, disappointed and been disappointed by. Much of his act turns on precise—and hilarious—depictions of the ways men and women completely fail to understand each other. He spoke withPT's Kathleen McGowan about modern fatherhood and the lighter side of family malice.

PT: A lot of your act spoofs stereotypes—how do you play with prejudices without antagonizing your audience?

JL: I don't want to be aplacebo. I want people to be shaken up a little. I don't mind a lowbrow fart-dick joke so long as I've earned it somehow. The struggle is to go to all those levels. I love all my characters, even the ones I'm attacking. That's why I'm an actor. It makes me appreciate differences and oddities, things that other people are put off orbored by.

You were born in Colombia, and your father is Puerto Rican. What perspective does that give you on U.S. family life?

Growing up here in Queens it was just nuclear family: dad, mom and my brother. Quiet. Too tired from work. Get home. Turn on the TV. Get rid of the kids. Next day, same thing. When I went back to Latin America, it was amazing. Everybody was together—there were so many orators and witty people; dinner would last for four hours. That's what influenced my work.

You joke that you come from "a long line of sick, twisted, dysfunctional relationships." How have you escaped that?

My father didn't give you choices. He didn't ask what you wanted; he told you what he wanted. But I don't want to be like my dad. I don't want to repeat what he did. When I'm not working, I have to be Dad—I have to be taking my kids to school, picking them up, taking them to the bathroom. It's expected. The reversal of roles is wild. But there's a closeness that happens when you do mundane things with your kids. It's liketherapy. It's a Zen thing. I don't have to be doing important shit all the time—it's nice to be subservient to your child, up to a point.

Is it strange to see your kids grow up so differently from how you did?

Yeah! They have a country house. I had a public community pool that people peed in. I've been asking my friends—how do we fuck them up a little bit? So that they grow up right. Because you've got to have adversity. You've got to understand that to hit bottom—to fail—is not a bad thing. Kids that don't have adversity—once they hit the wall, they just break. But what can I do—perform some kind of fiendish experiment? Throw them into a ghetto school and say, hey, go fend for yourself?

This is your secondmarriage—and you make a lot of dark jokes about the first, which ended in divorce. What did you learn?

I don't think people should be married before age 30! You don't know who you are, and yourhormones are too crazy. It's hard to take back things that you've said to one another. Once you say something, it's never really gone. You've got an imaginary scoreboard on both sides. It seems like women in their 40s are all leaving their men. I have a lot of guy friends who want to blame the chick—she's the one who left. But I tell them: You're the one who drove her away, brother.

Do you have any insight to help men and women get what they want from each other?

We like to have our egos caressed all the time: "You're a great provider. What a hero you are. You are so amazing in bed." Lie if you have to! Guys will do anything. For men, what's always so hard not to do is to try to solve everything. It's almost impossible. We are so programmed to give advice, to say fix this, do this, do that. You have to just switch yourself off. You know all that when you're firstdating. The guy pays moreattention. The woman swoons more—makes a big production. You make each other feel great. And then you both start getting tired.

The character you play inCronicas is morally complex—a self-promoting TV reporter who also wants to catch the bad guy.

It's in the pattern of things that I'm picking, films with ambiguousmorality. That's what I'm really feeling in this country. I don't feel like I have any real heroes.Assault on Precinct 13 also touches on that: Are the good guys really the good guys and the bad guys really the bad guys?Cronicas is based on a true story from Latin America: A serial killer gets away with killing 200 boys. The movie is not a thriller—you kind of know who did it. The point instead is my character's dilemma—his sense of morality, his ego, his vanity. Because he can use this opportunity to further hiscareer, to make himself more powerful, but also to really help people.

I've heard you're working on a new one-act—and it's a real departure from your previous shows.

I want to do something totally different. In this one there is less performing. It's a little more intellectual. It's a little more political. There's still some personal shit in there: It highlights my career, and how I was contributing to some of the problems. I don't want to be sued, so it's tricky. And I have to get perspective on myself, which is always the hardest part.

You were close to your grandfather—in your act, you talk about taking care of him as he was dying.

He was a warm big jolly fat man, this big Latin Santa Claus. I was so happy to see him. He loved us like we were his own kids. He did some horrible things to my father, and to me, but he also played with us all the time, listened to us, gave us presents and told us jokes. He was a great role model.

Were you relieved after your parentsdivorced? It sounds like they fought all the time.

No matter how horrible my parents' situation was, some part of me wanted them to be together. I was jumping up for joy when I heard they were divorced. But when I saw children with their original parents, I wasjealous.

A lot of people close to me experienced their parents' divorce at different ages. I experienced it at 13, but some of my friends went through it at 21 or at 36, and they acted the way that I did at 13. No matter how muchwisdom you have, there's that visceral feeling: You want your parents to be together.

You've said that you want to be a different kind of father than your own dad. Where do you look for examples?

There are some great qualities to my father, but he was an absent father figure, and now he's an absent grandfather figure. I want to be present.

One of my friends is a great dad. He's got three daughters, and he coaches their basketball team, teaches them karate. One of his daughters is a black belt. Another friend has two adopted daughters. And they're both Latin men.

They're going beyond the call of duty—none of that absent father thing. I guess men are realizing that there's a great thing to be had by [spending time with] kids. It feeds you.

America is a strange country. I'm a foreigner, so I have a little bit of perspective, but the family unit here is fucked up. It's a tragedy that old people are put in homes instead of being part of the home. Old people—that's where you see wisdom. It's such an important thing to have all those ages in the same house.