Ray Romano

Letterman's Check

Ray Romano reached David Letterman's couch in 1995 with a suitcase full of jokes about his family and a shyness that seemed staged. That May night changed his life because the host saw in him something more than a comedian from Queens. Letterman decided to produce a series based on his life, and so one of the most profitable comedies in American television was born.

Everybody Loves Raymond debuted in 1996 with modest ratings. But audiences soon connected with the family man smothered by his parents and his brother, who lived right across the street. The simplicity of the scripts avoided moral lessons and preferred to focus on mundane arguments about luggage or food.

Nobody expected it to last nine seasons.

In 2003, Romano signed a contract that made him the highest-paid actor in television at that time. He earned 1.8 million dollars per episode during the final stage of production. The figure alarmed CBS executives, but the ratings justified every cent spent on his salary.

The Fear of Being Typecast

After the end of the sitcom in 2005, many critics assumed Romano would fade from the spotlight. The actor turned to poker and professional tournaments while looking for a different tone for his next projects. In 2009, he co-created Men of a Certain Age with Mike Royce. It was a bittersweet series that explored the midlife crisis of fifty-somethings without canned laughter or forced situations.

TNT canceled the project after two seasons due to a lack of mass audiences. It was a hard blow for Romano because he felt it was his most personal work to date. But that cancellation allowed him to explore supporting roles with more dramatic weight in shows like Parenthood.

Ray Romano was no longer the funny guy of the nineties.

Then the call from Martin Scorsese came. In 2016, he played Zak Yankovich in Vinyl, and his performance as a desperate record executive stood out in New York's circles. Scorsese cast him again in 2019 for The Irishman, where he shared the screen with Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, playing the lawyer Bill Bufalino with complete composure.

Maturity Behind the Camera

In 2022, he took things a step further and made his directing debut with the film Somewhere in Queens. He also wrote the script, which followed a father obsessed with his son's athletic success in high school. Critics praised Romano for avoiding artificial happy endings to focus on the anxiety of the Italian American middle class.

In 2024, he joined the cast of the Netflix series No Good Deed. Filming for this dark comedy was scheduled in Los Angeles under the direction of Liz Feldman. The plot revolves around three families competing to buy the same Spanish-style house from the 1920s.

The production contract for this project set a four-month shooting schedule on locations in California.