Brazilian-born actor Bruno Campos, a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Northwestern University, catapaulted to fame as Christina Applegate's Chilean neighbor Diego Vasquez in her sitcom, Jesse - but not before building the foundation for it with a truly remarkable combination of hard work, courage, determination and a steadfast refusal to back down in the face of adversity.
Fifty years from now, while being handed a 'Lifetime Achievement' award of some sort, they'll still be telling the story of how he refused to leave a Warner Brothers' executive's office until he had a deportation-halting deal - and got it - a moment he still recalls as being the day when he decided "to refuse to accept the word no". With a strong theater background, an Oscar-winning film and two successful series already on his resume, it's easy to overlook his relatively young age, only 27, but not hard to envision a long and successful future for an actor with his drive and talent. His current role is as attorney Joe Rivera in the Showtime original series, "Leap Years", where he continues to attract new fans.The third of four children, and the only son, born to Paulo and Thania Campos, Bruno left Rio de Janeiro with his family (parents and sisters Mara, Adriana and Mariana) at 5 and spent the next decade changing addresses every few years as his father's job postings changed. "It was hard to leave friends, having to sell your bike because it wouldn't fit in the moving van," says Campos. "It was a roller-coaster ride, but I learned to appreciate it. The ability to arrive in a new place and adapt is probably the best skill I developed as a kid."
"When I was little, with all that moving around, I lived for what I termed 'Destination Nest"' he adds. "It was the biggest boost to my growth. I soaked up a lot of cultures and religions, observed people and was bombarded with information. This type of life removes personal barriers, because with more diversity, the more universal you become."
His interest in - and then focus on - acting, began at a very early age. He recalled during a 1998 online chat that his very first exposure to acting was playing a "passenger being mugged on a subway" in a skit, at the age of eight. Already standing 5'11" by age 11 (he's now 6'1"), he was playing Prince Charming at 13 in a school production of Cinderella and dallying with an assistant director, a girl five years his senior. He told People, "It was very absurd for a 13-year-old to be dating an 18-year-old girl, but I was a cool little dude." He continued his acting when the family moved to Bahrain, appearing in a production of "Annie" in 1986.
In 1988, with his father preparing to retire from the Banco do Brasil and move the family back to Rio, Bruno persuaded his father to let him continue his studies at Michigan's Interlochen Arts Academy and to pay the then $11,000-a-year tuition. "I took his trust very seriously," Campos says of his father, who is recently divorced and now works as a real estate lawyer in Rio. "I feel like my job is to make him proud."
After graduating from Interlochen in 1991, Campos studied acting at Northwestern University, where he was discovered by a Chicago director and given the lead role in the prestigious Goodman Theater production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, received a bachelor's degree, and, in 1995, returned to Brazil, where he won a Portuguese-speaking role in O Quatrilho, a 1996 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. After saving enough money to finance a return to the United States by also doing a commercial and playing a role in a television series in Brazil, he arrived in Los Angeles officially as a foreign tourist but he knew he had enough money to stay for eight months while he diligently tried to land a talent contract. Seven months passed without even a nibble. "I felt like my life was going to end," says Campos. He told one agent, "I have never been burning to fight more in my life. So you give me a shot, and if it doesn't work, big deal, you've lost four weeks of your life. I've lost my whole dream." He told students at Interlochen, when he returned for four days in 1998, that he had gone to 89 auditions in just the previous year and still did not give up. Instead, he said, he became more determined and changed his attitude to reflect his passion for his art.
Two weeks before his money ran out, and facing deportation because of an expiring tourist visa, the agent decided to represent Campos and got him a meeting at Warner Brothers Television, which led to another meeting, and another. He trotted out his "I'm-about-to-become-an-illegal-alien" spiel several times, effectively hypnotizing a string of progressively higher-ups before finally going before Warner Brothers TV President Tony Jonas. Campos "felt like James Bond, diffusing the bomb. There's like 25 seconds left, and you just have to do it." He got the development deal with Warner Brothers, thereby also fulfilling the work-permit requirements for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "I got the offer in the nick of time," he says. "When you have a time deadline hanging over you, with obstacles like I.N.S. regulations, you come to know pressure and you must become a gunslinger to fulfill your dream - or else it dies." He describes reacting to the news of his deal with Warner Brothers first in open-mouthed shock, and then screaming for 45 minutes during his commute home. Guest appearances on Suddenly Susan (as the gay Cuban brother of actor Nestor Carbonell), Chicago Sons and Cybill and the miniseries The Last Don followed before he was cast for Jesse.
After Jesse turned him into what might be best - albeit inaccurately - described as an "overnight success", enjoyed by over 12 million viewers a week, he commented that the success "makes me feel like the 10 years of commitment I've put into wanting to be an actor make sense. For all those times when someone would ask me, "Oh, what are you studying?" and I'd kind of wince before saying, "Theater.' All of a sudden, I'm very proud that I stuck with it and that it's working."
He found a great deal of satisfaction in playing the Chilean-born Diego. "He's very direct and open-hearted. He listens to women and you can count on him to help. He's solid, passionate and has guts." he said once, and another time, "He's Cary Grant with an accent, one of the most three dimensional characters I've ever played." His portrayal won him numerous awards and accolades from Hispanic organizations such as the American Latin Media Arts Award for his positive, "stereotype-busting" portrayal. His popularity and recognition factor soared. He described attending a jazz festival in New Orleans during the show's run and being surprised by the number of women calling out to him on the street, "Hey, Diego!"
Instead of falling victim to his own rising popularity, he instead made use of it in some surprising ways: taping a public service announcement on parental involvement for NBC's "In the Know", and returning to Interlochen in 1998 to impart his knowledge and experience to the school's struggling young students while Jesse was still on the air. He also discovered that he was now able to relax more, and to find the time to learn new things, such as playing the guitar, instead of devoting every moment of his time to "worrying about his next move". The maturity he gained early on in his life has so far seemed to keep him well grounded; he is surrounded by too many others whose inability to handle sudden fame and recognition has been disasterous. In that respect, it is possible that he had a good role model in Christina Applegate, who has seemed to handle her early fame as "Kelly Bundy" with bemused equanimity.
Describing his chemistry with Applegate, Campos said, "It's like dancing a tango. I go left, she goes left. She goes right, I go right. We just know where we're going. And it's so easy, with her." The more extreme Diego's comedy became, the more fun Campos had. He especially enjoyed an episode in which Diego got sick and hallucinated. "Before Jesse, Campos said, he'd "never been asked to be goofy. Generally speaking ... I don't fit into the 'goofy' category." Maybe not then ... but he proved himself more than willing to be as "goofy" as he had to be, opening up future possibilities for more comedic roles.
Critics generally considered him one of the show's highlights, both for his charisma and his appearance. He was called everything from "impossibly handsome", "swarthily handsome", "NBC's latest must-see hunk", to the "humanistic-hunk- next-door", but was also singled out for his portrayal, even if they weren't particularly fond of the show in general.
"Bruno Campos as Diego deserves better ...", commented one critic, "The writers have been smart enough to put this wry, appealing actor closer to the center of things; now all they have to do is give him some actual jokes." Another review singled him out as the "one exception" to her dismal perception of NBC's Thursday night line-up, after the loss of Seinfeld:
"The exception to the general pointlessness is Bruno Campos' Diego, who makes Christina Applegate's Jesse crackle to life when he enters the room."
He was named as one of "Prime-Time TV's 12 Sexiest Stars" by TV Guide.
Despite excellent ratings, the program was cancelled, and he went on to sign a three-picture deal with Miramax. His first film under that contract, released straight to video by Dimension, a Miramax subsidiary, was his first film in the horror genre, "Hardshell", or "Mimic 2", a sequel to the original Mimic. In this film, he played a New York City detective who finds himself trapped in a run down inner city school with an elementary school teacher with a passion for insects, and two students, all of them on the run from a breed of gigantic mutant cockroaches. The film required much out of him: chomping great quantities of toothpicks, diving out of the path of falling bodies, soberly reflecting on the sexual habits of insects and being splattered with gallons of "splooge", the technical term used by the crew for the white gooey "bug-guts" he was sprayed with every time he pulled the trigger of a gun at one of the gigantic roaches.
"I've never worn a coat that looked like a bad sexual accident before." was his dry (or perhaps not) comment after being drenched in the splooge after one particularly gooey take. The DVD of the film included some additional footage taken on the set, showing a very relaxed Campos, obviously enjoying himself and taking great interest in the special effects employed in the film. In later interviews with a Brazilian dot.com, he would remark that the some of the closest friends he had in Hollywood were not, in fact, other actors, but technicians and other friends made during the making of "Hardshell".
His next role is his present one, the role of Joe Rivera, in Showtime's unusual new series Leap Years. The premise behind this program is interesting: the lives of five friends during three separate time periods. Critics were mixed on whether or not they thought the premise worked, but had praise for Bruno's portrayal of the attorney, one observing, "Bruno Campos ("Jesse"), ... rises above what once seemed like pretty-boy looks to paint a vivid picture of Joe, a driven young Latino lawyer who gradually sacrifices his personal happiness to his career."
As the Leap Years episodes unfold, viewers are treated to a multi-faceted character, whose many layers are being slowly peeled back with careful surgical precision as the weeks progress: a strong, outwardly confident, determined man capable of anger, resentment, coldness, reflection, longing, guilt, love, passion ... whose greatest fear is that someone will eventually realize that he is, like the 'Heathcliff' he admires in literature, at his core only "Joey Rivera" from the South Bronx, longing for the woman he loves over the chasm of their opposing backgrounds. Bruno Campos is creating a truly memorable man, week by week - if you haven't tuned into Showtime's Leap Years yet, do it now - you are missing a wonderful program.
If he has one challenge facing him as he begins what is surely to be a successful career as an actor, it will be the tightrope of avoiding being typecast, while never losing his proven ability to break badly entrenched stereotypes. Made aware of this when he first arrived in Hollywood, he told People magazine in 1999 that "I felt a boundary, like, this is our limited idea of what Latino means. You have to conform."
"Feeling" the boundary was not the same thing as accepting it or conforming to it. If anything, he seems strongly bent on ignoring it. He imbued Diego Vasquez with a depth, dignity, humor and maturity few actors could have managed as successfully at his age, and (after a very brief period of viewer adjustment to the discovery that the actor behind the much loved "Diego" did not have any accent at all), he is doing the same with Joe Rivera on Leap Years. His recurring guest starring role on the ground breaking "Resurrection Boulevard", the first series with a full Hispanic cast, is one that any actor would be proud to have on their resume; his role of "Carlos" on Suddenly Susan was lauded as the first time that the San Francisco-based series actually paid more than a glancing nod at the city's large gay population.
On the other hand, he had early on been handed guest roles, such as "Gianni" on Cybill, which did little more than reinforce the poor image many Italian men must overcome: that if they are not mafiosi they are then pounded into the shallow and heartless "Latin lover" category, one of the more destructive and demeaning labels they confront regularly. In a video interview for Showtime Online he decried the use of such labels that many actors in Hollywood face, considering himself first and foremost an "actor", and not a "Latino actor". "I am Brazilian", he said, "but I don't carry the flag to work." A brief glance at his filmography may reflect an early long list of Latino and Italian characters and names: Massimo, Carlos, Jimmy Santadio, Raoul, Carlos, Gianni, Joseph Marquez, Joe Rivera ... but does contain one reassuring exception: Detective Klaski. His character on Leap Years, despite the nationality, is such a strong, appealing and universally recognizable one, that it can't help but propel him further past that imaginary boundary. He has already begun to prove his ability to break free of the career-busting, "He is from Brazil; ergo, he must be cast as a ..." destructive Hollywood mind-set, and if anyone has the focus, the drive, the determination - and the talent - to break free of the mold and do just that, it is Bruno Campos.
When not working, Campos has told various interviewers that he enjoys playing pool ("The Hustler" is one of his favorite movies) and admits that he picked up extra cash as a college student by challenging fellow amateurs. He also likes running, rock-climbing, river rafting, golf and is a fan of World Cup soccer and the Chicago Bulls. Campos' birthday is December 3, making him a Sagittarius.
