Happy Birthday, Richard Grieco

Richard Grieco is 49 today, and it's been roughly 28 years since he landed his first significant role on the daytime drama One Life to Live.  Here he is making his appearance in Llanview (and on fan radar).




In the intervening years, Richard had a key role in the popular Fox television drama 21 Jump Street, the lead role in his own spin-off from that series (Booker) and the lead in the television series Marker. He's also appeared in other television shows, including a recurring role in the cult favorite Veronica Mars. 

In 1991, he had starring roles in two major motion pictures: If Looks Could Kill and Mobsters. After that, Richard's profile dropped somewhat and less devoted fans may have lost track of him. But, he was never really off the radar. Since 1991, Richard has made 44 additional movies, including the SNL-branded A Night at the Roxbury. Two others are currently rumored, and 2014 looks like it could be a very big year for Richard.

But, this long list of acting credits only scratches the surface of what Grieco has been up to in the years since 21 Jump Street. He released a CD, Waiting for the Sky to Fall, and toured Europe. He voiced video game characters, automobile advertisements and cartoon characters. He conceived of an produces the Showtime reality show Gigolos. Oh, and all the while, he was actually an artist at heart.

That's more than a lifetime's work, but Grieco shows no signs of slowing down. Here's hoping he's having a great birthday and looking back with pleasure on the rich life he's led thus far.

People Magazine on Richard Grieco, 1989

It's always interesting to see what the press was saying in the moment, as opposed to the rewritten history that surfaces in bios and summaries across the web.  This 1989 People article not only sheds some in-the-moment light on the 21 Jump Street relationships, but includes a snippet of one of Richard's poems.  (Makes me glad I'm not a celebrity--I definitely wouldn't want poems from my early 20s surfacing online today!)

Picked from among 500 casting-call hopefuls to play Jump's cool-rebel newcomer, Dennis Booker, Grieco, 24, has been greeted this season by surging ratings and fan mail that avalanches in at the reported rate of 10,000 letters a month. "Girls see him and scream at the top of their lungs," says co-star Peter DeLuise. "Sometimes they achieve a pitch that's quite painful." In fact. Grieco is already such a draw that he will be spun off into a Fox series of his own next fall. Aware that his overnight stardom has caused hard feelings on the set, Grieco is unapologetic. "There are people in Jump Street who are jealous from the attention I get," he says. "The actors don't say anything, but I can tell."

I also found it interesting that People's scene-setting description included, "with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other..."  Nothing shocking there, except that the 1990 book about Grieco, Richard Grieco: Hot 'n' Cool, was quite explicit in its claim that Richard was serious about his anti-drug message and didn't even drink alcohol.  Told you those books couldn't be trusted ;)

Richard Grieco: Hot 'n' Cool

Did you miss me last night?

Don't worry--I haven't abandoned my post.  You didn't hear from me last night because when I'm usually blogging, I was doing my homework. By which I mean, I was reading this (so you don't have to):

As far as I've been able to find thus far, this is the only book ever published about Richard. It was rushed out in the summer of 1990, when Booker was on the air and If Looks Could Kill was a speculative possibility for the future.  In addition to being wildly outdated, it's pretty bad.  So bad that I kind of want to write a better one.  Don't laugh--it wouldn't be my first book.

Assuming that the information in this book is accurate (and that is a big assumption given the way these books are produced), I did learn a few interesting things, a few things that made me say, "Awww" and a few things that made me wonder what went wrong in the couple of years following Booker and publication of this book.

I'll share a few.

Interesting tidbits:

• Richard apparently started getting fan mail at 21 Jump Street after a commercial aired introducing him--before he'd ever appeared on the show.
• According to the book, Grieco's fan letters during his single season on 21 Jump Street far outnumbered those received by Johnny Depp.

Things that made me say, "Awww":

• During Booker, Richard says he had a list of about 35 fans facing serious crises like cancer whom he called once a month to check in and ask how they were doing.
• He hired his mom to answer his fan mail, but asked her to pull out letters from teenagers writing to him about their problems in case he might be able to help.

Things that made me kind of sad:

• Grieco was already in his mid-twenties when this book was written and claimed that he didn't drink and had "never done any drugs".  But in the late nineties, he admitted to entering rehab.  Clearly, something slipped seriously off track in the relatively few intervening years.
• He talked about turning down multiple scripts because he "took his acting seriously" and would never do movies like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes vs. the Green Squash because he "just didn't believe in them."  Looking at some of the movies he ultimately appeared in, I find myself wondering whether he expected more from them in the draft stages or was simply so eager to work that his standards had fallen dramatically.

I'm taking it all with a grain of salt, given what I know about the mill that creates this kind of book.  Most of it, though, I want to be true.  The whole picture painted made Grieco seem much more likeable than I'd ever anticipated.