For ten years, I have not been cool in my daughter's eyes. That's not a complaint — that's the job. You don't get to raise a kid to seventeen and stay cool. It's a trade you make.
Then one Friday night, I was shooting a gala. Got hired because apparently I'm fancy now. Phone rings — and it's her, which never happens. She doesn't like talking on the phone to me. It's fine. She's not into it.
I picked up thinking it was an emergency.
She was with her friends. She said, "Do you know Berto Colon?" I told her Berto's my boy — we met at the gym. She said, "Do you know he's on Dutton Ranch?" I said, yeah. He's going to be my first guest next week. I'm starting a podcast. We're recording at Two River Pictures, ten minutes from my house.
And for the first time in a decade, I was cool. Not for what I do for a living. Not for the network credits. Cool because I happened to know the guy who plays Miguel on the new Taylor Sheridan show.
That's the kind of thing that happens when you live near Berto.
The gym.
We met at the box. Power Pack CrossFit in Atlantic Highlands. If you've been there you know the place — Frank Delaney runs it, there's a Battle by the Bay every year, and the same people show up at five in the morning and the energy is somewhere between a family reunion and a fight club.
Berto's the guy in the middle of the photo. Always. Six-one, two-twenty, looks like he was carved out of something. He'll tell you he's six-one. Other people will tell you he's six-three. He gets typecast for a reason, and you understand it the second he walks in.
He posted a workout photo of a few of us once. His fans came for me in the comments — something about a couple of white boys flexing on their king. Fair enough. This piece is partly an apology for that photo.
Who he actually is.
Berto grew up in Puerto Rico. His dad was a calf roper. They went to rodeos every weekend for a few years when Berto was a kid. His dad got a quarter horse named Duque — half wild, cheap, because nobody else could ride it. Berto watched him train that horse to keep tension on the rope while he dismounted, ran to the calf, threw it on its side, and tied the legs. That's an event. That's a clock.
Years later, that's the kid Taylor Sheridan didn't know he was hiring for Dutton Ranch.
But before any of that there was football. Berto was a running back and a linebacker at Lehman High in the Bronx. Got recruited. South Carolina was talking to him. Senior year, his team was headed to the city finals, and he told his guys: we're going all the way.
Ten minutes later he blew out his knee.
Fordham still took him on the recruiting tape. He played three more years through a revision surgery on the same knee — then blew out the other one. NFL dreams, done. He went to work at New York Life, but the acting thing had been sitting in the back of his mind since he was a little kid in school plays. He started taking classes at Lincoln Center on the side, and once he started, he knew.
His first paying job was a voiceover for Taco Cabana. Regional campaign. I asked him to send me the audio. We're going to play it on the podcast.
The break.
He kept going. Off-off-off-Broadway. Soap operas. NCIS. Elementary. Then came Orange Is the New Black. Cesar — his friends still call him their drug-dealing pimp, because that's the role he played and they refuse to let it go.
That part started as a co-star — one episode, no deals — and grew into the kind of character people still stop him for on the street. Then came Show Me a Hero with David Simon, which ended on the last day of shooting in Puerto Rico, Berto poolside at the El San Juan Hotel doing tequila shots with his dad, his cousin, and David Simon. His dad had no idea who David Simon was. Dad, did you ever watch The Wire?
Then When They See Us with Ava DuVernay. Then Power Book II: Ghost, where he played Mary J. Blige's incarcerated husband, running a drug empire from inside the prison while she ran it on the outside. He shot episodes of that show while still working his day job as a Ketel One brand ambassador — sneaking into the city between accounts before he finally called his manager and said I have to go.
Then came Dutton Ranch.
Cowboy camp.
Every actor in America has tried to get on a Taylor Sheridan show in the last four years. Berto recorded his self-tape audition at Actors Playground in Freehold — Ralph Colombino's acting school, where his daughter Sofia had also been taking classes. He booked it.
Then they shipped him to Fort Worth for cowboy camp.
You can do the math. Roped-calf dad in Puerto Rico, the kid watching every weekend, and fifty years later that same kid is in Texas getting paid to learn how to ride. Six months of horseback. Four months of cowboy camp — two weeks mandatory, the rest optional. Berto took every optional day.
He told me about a rule the wranglers taught them. If you're first to a gate, you open it. The rest of the riders go through. They wait. You close the gate behind everyone. Then the whole group rides on together. Nobody trots ahead. Nobody leaves the guy doing the work behind. The crew waits, every time, out of respect for whoever drew the short straw on that gate.
I knew exactly what he meant. That rule doesn't exist in regular life anymore. It doesn't exist on a film set in the city. It doesn't exist in a New York deli at 8 AM. It barely exists at the gym. The idea that a group of people would actually stand still while one guy finishes what he started — and nobody complains, nobody fills the silence, nobody pulls out a phone — that's a thing from another world. A thing he didn't expect to find at fifty.
The Ed Harris thing.
He told me a story about Ed Harris that I'm not going to fully give away. It's one of his upcoming episodes, and I want you to watch it without knowing. The short version: Harris quietly set up a scene that the director hadn't asked for, before the director called action. Got a hundred people in a room living the moment that was supposed to have happened just before the cut. So when action got called, the cast wasn't sitting there dead waiting for the line. They were already in it.
That's a working actor talking. Twenty-five years in and he's still hunting for the next thing he can steal from someone who's better.
I treat my own job the same way. Every gig is an audition — every edit, every client, every shoot. If I'm rude to someone, I close a door. Berto told me Michael Caine wrote about this in a book he read early on. The second you walk into the room, the receptionist is taking notes. The agents are taking notes. The other actors are taking notes. You are auditioning the whole time.
He called it the crux of the matter. I think he's right.
Why he's here.
People ask me why I started Hollywood East Films. The Netflix campus is the obvious answer. The proximity to the city. The fact that this stretch of coast is about to be the most-watched piece of New Jersey in fifty years.
But the actual answer is the people.
Berto moved here in 2010 with his wife and two babies — two and one years old. They came out of Jersey City. Their first house was a few minutes down the street from mine, and they had nothing in it. Lawn chairs in the living room. Then Hurricane Irene hit a few months later and they were stranded for two weeks with no power, his in-laws there, babies in the house. He was walking out to the Croydon Hall woods chopping wood to keep the fireplace going.
He told me that was the moment he knew.
He could live anywhere. He's worked with Jenji Kohan, Ava DuVernay, Courtney Kemp, David Simon, Ed Harris, Mary J. Blige, Cole Hauser, Kelly Reilly. He's about to ride a horse into the rest of his career. And he's chosen to raise his daughters here.
He thinks Beacon Hill is one of the best views in the area. He goes to One Willow in the Highlands for date night, seven minutes from his house. He thinks Delio's in South Amboy makes the best slice. He goes to Ember & Eagle at Suneagles in Eatontown — Ryan DePersio's modern Italian chophouse — when he wants something special. He goes to Hotel LBI for the sunset. He surfs the Jersey juice when the swells come up.
He's of this place in a way that doesn't show up on IMDb.
What this means for the area.
When the Netflix campus opens at Fort Monmouth, the people who already live here are going to matter more than the people moving in. The crews and the productions and the new arrivals are going to be looking for legitimacy — they're going to be looking for who was here before it got noticed.
Berto Colon is that guy. So is the working actor I haven't met yet who also has a body of work, also raised kids here, also chose Monmouth County over LA. So is the restaurant owner in the Highlands who's been making the same pizza for forty years. So are the agents working Rumson and Fair Haven who have spent twenty years memorizing the streets.
These are the people The Slate is going to write about. Some of them are clients. Most aren't. All of them are the reason this area is going to mean something when the soundstages open.
What I want to say without saying it weird.
This is going to come out wrong, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Berto is one of the best people I've ever met. The man walks into a room and changes the temperature. He'll show up to a workout and tell you to keep going when you want to quit. He'll text you back. He'll repost your story. He'll do a podcast for you because he likes you, not because his publicist made him. He's a top-ten guy in a room with Ed Harris and a top-ten guy at Power Pack at five in the morning, and somehow those are the same guy.
That's not a casting profile. That's a person.
If you live here and you don't know him, now you do. If you're a writer or a director or a producer reading this — he's available, he's good, and he lives twelve minutes from set.
If you're his daughter Sofia and you've stumbled onto this — your dad is, in fact, the coolest dad. I'm sorry to break it to you. I've got a teenager too. I'm not cool to her either. It's not personal — it's the job.