I swear, I see more of Daniel Sunjata these days than my own missus. There he is on Tuesday nights, playing Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson on ESPN mini-series The Bronx is Burning (he’s a little too tall and a little too thin for Jax, but otherwise plays him pretty well).
Then on Wednesdays, there’s Sunjata playing firefighter Franco on FX’s Rescue Me (below), wondering if he should go through with his engagement, or break it off to be with Susan Sarandon’s character.
I remember what Irvine Welsh said about Trainspotting years ago, how the film worked so well because you didn’t know a single actor in the cast. On the other end of the spectrum, seeing Sunjata portray these different characters on successive nights, with his fairly limited range of emotive facial smirks and tics, detracts from the series’ stories. I wonder if that was a concern for either series when they were casting for Bronx.
