John Leguizamo

At NYU, he's said, white classmates got five to ten auditions a day while he got one every five months, always for a drug dealer or a janitor. Leguizamo took that frustration and turned it into Mambo Mouth in 1991, a one-man show that did what the industry wouldn't: gave Latinos a full range of characters to inhabit. Freak hit Broadway in 1998, with Spike Lee directing the HBO special that followed, and earned him a Tony nomination and an Emmy, the first Latino to win for a variety or music performance. He built a career out of being the one guy Hollywood kept trying to put in a box.

For years, he's been calling Hollywood's treatment of Latinos 'cultural apartheid' while the industry kept giving him work anyway. Latinos buy 29% of U.S. box office tickets, he points out, and still occupy a fraction of the roles. The argument hasn't moved the needle much, but his profile keeps rising: Latin History for Morons became a Netflix special, and he's now cast in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey and Mike Flanagan's upcoming The Exorcist. Getting into Nolan's orbit is not what a career decline looks like.

A Finding Your Roots episode confirmed what his one-man shows kept circling: his ancestry runs 59.4% European, 24.5% Indigenous, with North African and Sub-Saharan African in the mix. His lineage reportedly includes both the conquistador Sebastian de Belalcazar and a conquest-era Indigenous Colombian nobleman, which he's said he found overwhelming. His great-great-grandfather was Mayor of Bogota for 16 years. In 2011, his own father went to CNN to deny the Puerto Rican heritage Leguizamo had claimed for years. The family is Colombian, the father said, and Leguizamo stuck to his story anyway.