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Worcester’s Anthony Molinari gets first lead role in ‘ The Last Deal’

Richard Duckett

Worcester Telegram & Gazette USA TODAY NETWORK

The new independent action crime drama film “The Last Deal” represents a first for Worcester native Anthony Molinari.

The former St. Peter-Marian High School football star and preschool and elementary school teacher left Worcester to try his luck as a stuntman in Hollywood just over 20 years ago. He is now the lead actor in a movie for the first time at the age of 47.

“This is my first lead role in a feature film. It’s a new experience, one never to forget, but very exciting,” said Molinari, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

Molinari made an impression with “The Last Deal” writer and director Jonathan Salemi from the start.

“He was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t have gotten a better actor,” Salemi said. “He was like my Tom Brady. He delivered my message to the rest of the cast.”

In “The Last Deal,” Molinari plays Vince, a long-time marijuana dealer in Los Angeles facing the prospect of recreational marijuana sales becoming legal in L.A. in 2018. Vince tries to pull off one last big underground marijuana deal before getting squeezed out of business. The film also stars Sala Baker, Jeffri Lauren, Mister Fitzgerald and Mike Ferguson,

“It has all the action elements. It’s nonstop all the time. He’s (Vince) up against a series of obstacles,” Salemi said.

“The Last Deal” will have its premiere at 9 p.m. April 15 at AMC Theatre, 175 Tremont St., Boston, as part of the Boston International Film Festival.

Molinari and Salemi, who is originally from Revere and now also lives in the Los Angeles area, both intend to be on hand for the screening.

That will also give Molinari a chance to come back to Worcester for a visit, something he said he tries to do often.

He grew up up on a dead end road just off Burncoat Street. His parents, older sister and younger brother all still live in the Worcester area, he said.

Molinari hasn’t forgotten where he’s from, and neither has his accent.

“He still has that accent, so that’s the character. It made it nice. Like a a working guy,” Salemi said of Molinari’s Vince.

“Thank God Jonathan took a risk. It was such an amazing leaning experience,” Molinari said.

Salemi was looking for an “action actor” to play the role of Vince — someone who can act and do his own stunts. There are a lot of scenes “running, punching and falling. I knew I couldn’t afford an actor without stunt experience,” Salemi said.

Salemi’s stunt coordinator, Carl Ciarfalio, a veteran in the business, knew Molinari and mentioned his name.

Salemi and Molinari spoke to each other, Molinari auditioned, and “a couple of weeks later I got a call (where they) offered me the part,” Molinari said. “From there it kind of blossomed into a relationship that was a great one for me, anyway. I had a lot of fun working with him (Salemi).”

The film was shot in August 2020, at a time when jobs were scarce because of the pandemic.

“He (Salemi) was able to go out and get an elite crew because no one was working,” Molinari said.

“Hard as it was going through the pandemic, this was a blessing in the darkness. We all went out and did it together, which was a lot of fun,” Molinari said.

At the former St. Peter-Marian Junior-High School (now St. Paul Diocesan Junior-Senior High School), Molinari rushed for a school-record 388 yards in a win as a junior football player, but a knee injury sidelined him for his senior season. He went on to graduate from Bowdoin College in Maine and then taught school for eight years, including in San Francisco and Newport, Rhode Island, and as a special education teacher at the Roosevelt Elementary School in Worcester.

“There were only nine of them (students) but it was like having 100 kids,” he recalled with an amused fondness.

Still, Molinari felt that he had established a good classroom when one day, Kenny, a student, took exception to having to relate about what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“This is stupid,” Kenny told “Mr. M.”

Then he asked, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” Molinari said.

The truth came out when Molinari mentioned Lee Majors and “The Fall Guy” and being a stuntman. A few days later Kenny gave Mr. M a brochure about

Worcester native Anthony Molinari stars in “The Last Deal.” PROMOTIONAL PHOTO

Molinari

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a stunt school in Seattle. “Where did you get this?” Molinari asked. “Off the internet,” Kenny replied.

Molinari did go to stunt school, then moved to Los Angeles, setting “little goals” for himself.

“My career took off five years after being out there,” Molinari said.

He worked as a stuntman and a double. After appearing in George Clooney’s “Leatherheads,” he was invited by Clooney to celebrate New Year’s Eve 2007 at his home.

Sitting in Clooney’s hot tub at the party, Molinari said he thought “‘This is crazy.’”

He has thoughts about his former life. “It was hard leaving teaching,” Molinari said. “I’d go back to teaching pre-school again in a heartbeat, and I’m sure it would keep me younger.”

The 2010 movie “The Fighter,” about Lowell fighter Micky Ward’s brutal boxing match with Shea Neary, is centered on Ward (played by Mark Wahlberg) and his relationship with his brother (Christian Bale). However, Molinari portrayed Neary. (Incidentally, the referee of the bout was played by Dale Place, who theatergoers might remember as the longtime Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” at The Hanover Theatre.)

And after “The Fighter,” Molinari said he was told, “You can be an actor.”

Molinari was not initially impressed. He said he told people, “‘That’s the last thing I want to do is act.’ I saw how the privacy can be taken away. But then I realized stunts aren’t so easy on my body. I started working on my acting chops.”

He was recently seen as Rohan in the movie “Tenet,” directed by Christopher Nolan.

Molinari will also be working again with Nolan on a new project, “Oppenheimer,” about J. Robert Oppenheimer, who has been called “the father of the atomic bomb.”

“I’m heading out this Saturday to go on that,” he said during a telephone interview last week.

Molinari said a friend told him he heard Nolan commenting, “Some guys have, it some guys don’t, and Anthony’s (Molinari) got it.” That bit of reporting made Molinari feel good.

“I’m very blessed to do what I do and get paid for it,” Molinari said.

He said he still does stunts, which leads back to being cast for “The Last Deal.”

“My whole foundation was stunts. A lot of producers and directors are looking for action actors as long as he’s got the (acting) chops.”

“The Last Deal” was “like family filmmaking because it was everyone chipping in, as opposed to, ‘You’re the stunt guy,’” Molinari said.

“That feeling of family filmmaking, for me personally, it was one of the most special parts of the film.”

Salemi had written and directed a comedy when he first came to Los Angeles titled “Ante Up.” But “it never got distributed,” he said. Salemi has since directed and produced critically acclaimed and world-wide distributed short films, feature documentaries, and television. But “technically this is my first feature,” he said of writing and directing “The Last Deal.”

So in a way Molinari and Salemi are in the same boat. “For me it’s been a long time coming,” Salemi said.

As Molinari had noted, Salemi said the pandemic helped with the film coming together.

“I was able to get a cast and crew together that I wouldn’t normally have had,” Salemi said.

While “The Last Deal” may have been family filmmaking, it was also what Salemi called “guerilla filmmaking,” given the circumstances and Salemi’s small budget. The film “is potentially one of the biggest guerrilla films made in the last decade or two,” he said.

Salemi had taken inspiration, in part, from an old film he watched one night in October 2019 by the late John Cassavetes that was he said he was “very guerilla-style, noir.”

With 2020 and “The Last Deal,” Salemi had his own story and an approach in mind.

Guerilla filmmaking includes showing up to a spot quickly and shooting without any permits.

“I used what I had around me. I have a buddy who’s a legal marijuana dealer. I know Los Angeles quite well now,” Salemi said.

“Because the pandemic happened there was no traffic in LA. I could easily scout around — know where the sun was in the sky, know who’s there.”

Locations he eyed included a river, a street near an airport, in fact “quite a few streets — all these streets wanted a permit,”

Which “The Last Deal” didn’t have.

Salemi and his team would only work at a given spot three hours at a time, “sometimes six, but we definitely pushed our limits quite often.”

Molinari knew what was going on, and even came on board as a producer of “The Last Deal.”

“Anthony did great. He was exactly what I needed — someone who would fully buy into the film. We have no permits. The police may come. Since it was his first lead role, he completely committed,” Salemi said.

The police did come.

“We met the police often,” Salemi said. “The key to doing it is being very respectful of your surroundings. When the police came and saw that we weren’t running amok, I would very respectfully tell them what we’re doing and they would let us do it.”

Molinari approvingly noted Salemi’s ability to think on the run. “Jonathan — he’s amazing. What he adapts with, creative stuff, in a short period of time,” he said.

“Anthony came aboard the project and combined both his love for acting and stunt work to make the film what it is,” said Salemi.

Several other people who are originally from Massachusetts worked on “The Last Deal,” including a sound mixer and music supervisor. “That’s a pretty good Massachusetts crowd that worked on the film,” Salemi said.

The film festival season is underway, and the Boston International Film Festival will screen over 100 movies beginning April 14. (The Massachusetts Independent Film Festival will be in Worcester for the first time April 13-16, but “The Last Deal” won’t be shown there.)

“My goal is to play at two or three film festivals and release the film in the fall, playing that process as it goes,” Salemi said.

Successful screenings can lead to successful distributor deals. “Festivals are a good catalyst to start everything. For me, in my unbiased opinion, it’s (”The Last Deal) a good film. It should speak for itself when distributors watch it. It’s exceeded my expectations,” Salemi said.

With so many films being made in the Worcester area these days, maybe Molinari should attach himself to a new film project here in the future.

“Anything to be in Worcester. I love coming home,” he concurred.

Besides family, “My best friends are still back there. They all still live in Worcester and we’ve never missed a beat. I’m truly grateful growing up in Worcester for the people I met. It gave me a great foundation for life.”

For more information about the Boston International Film Festival, visit www.bostoniff.com.

Anthony Molinari, left, and the cast and crew of “The Last Deal.” SUBMITTED

Rise Against kicks off return to heavy touring at Palladium

Jason Greenough

Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK

For as long as they’ve been a band, the members of Rise Against have been a touring-heavy group. Whether that way of doing things is antiquated or anachronistic in this day and age is subjective, that’s what they learned from their favorite bands growing up, and they’ve been on the grind to carry that torch themselves for over 20 years.

So naturally, the pandemic-forced time off from the road had the group feeling out of sorts, aside from obvious reasons. Such is the case especially for guitarist Zach Blair, who is quick to admit that the only hobby he subscribes to is playing music, and now as the Chicago-bred punk quartet get ready to kick off its first full year of touring North America since 2019 at Worcester Palladium on April 8 in support of its latest studio effort “Nowhere Generation,” Blair is just excited to get back out there and deliver the new songs to fans with the emotional power that comes along with playing music in a live setting.

“Once you record something and you see it through like that, it’s your baby, and you really want to go play it for everyone so they can check out the new stuff,” says Balir. “Not being able to do that yet has been sort of an odd feeling, for sure. It’s almost as if we have some unfinished business to take care of, so this is going to be great.”

Obviously, playing music is their job, career and their business all wrapped into one, and it’s not always glamorous. However, it’s also the one thing that each of the four members of the band collectively love to do, and Blair is looking forward to having the opportunity to make that evident to fans as they scream the songs back at them, because as he sees it, that exuberance is contagious, and can dictate how the show will play out on any given night. Even more, Blair acknowledges that, at the core of the band’s historically energetic stage presence, is not only the excitement of playing their music, but also the desire to help their fans forget about the struggles they’re going through for at least a few hours, and with everything that’s at play in their return to Worcester, and to the stage in general, they aren’t really planning on changing that objective any time soon.

“Any time you go see a good live band, and that’s not to brag about ourselves, the feeling is palpable,” says Blair. “You can tell when bands really want to be there that night, and of course, some bands have off nights for whatever reason, but you can look at that stage and know that they just don’t want to be there. Our band has never been like that. We love doing this, and we want to make sure that if you’re coming to see Rise Against, that you’re going to see four individuals that really want to be up there on stage, and still recognize just how lucky we still are that people still show up to watch us do what we do.”

The last time the band rolled through Worcester, as part of their “Mourning In America” tour in 2018 with AFI and AntiFlag, the messages pouring from the stage were naturally more urgent in a political and social sense. Now, as they prepare to return alongside Pennywise and Stick To Your Guns, that aspect isn’t as urgent as before, but in no way has the desire to bring awareness to important causes dimmed.

Citing frontman Tim McIlrath’s unwavering ability to express the band’s core beliefs in pretty much everything he does, Blair knows that there will never be a shortage of topics to touch on, either in the studio or on stage, and he hopes that with this new batch of songs and myriad troubles like climate change and the Russian invasion of Ukraine at the hands of a madman unfortunately still prevalent in the news today, that Rise Against’s call to action will continue to encourage fans to get involved and make a difference in the world in their own ways.

“We made this record during the Trump years, and it came out during Biden’s administration. Of course, for us and our particular beliefs, we are much better off as a nation, and in my personal opinion, a rotting tomato would be a better president than the last one,” says Blair. “But it’s still politics, and you still want to hold their feet to the fire because they’re still speaking for you and maybe they’re not doing it in a way you want. We’re much better off, but we’re still not perfect and there are still a lot of things to talk about, so I think there is always going to be a place for Rise Against, and I definitely don’t think that right now is an exception.”

Rise Against is set to perform at the Palladium. COURTESY OF JASON SIEGEL

Changing how we think about living with our animal neighbors

Veer Mudambi

Worcester Magazine | USA TODAY NETWORK

When a farmer was heard to say, ‘this particular group of boar is very sneaky,” Roopa Krithivasan, PhD student in Clark’s Graduate School of Geography, was intrigued. What contributed to her research was listening to farmers talk about their regular encounters with wildlife and the fact that they are very cognizant of the fact that anything they do prompts a type of adaptation in animal behavior.

Krithivasan has been working on the general topic of human/wildlife interaction issues since she finished college in 2007 and has studied interactions between farmers and wildlife all over the world. Her message is simple, “we simplify how we think about wildlife — there is a whole lot more behavioral complexity and adaptation that we don’t encounter in the literature or in how managers talk about wildlife, but it’s very much there.”

Her work of studying animal agency has a definite landscape and land-use component, especially her field research which looks at land-use outcomes in response to human/wildlife conflict. “The farmers’ understanding of individual animal personalities and adaptive processes influences how they use their landscape and is a big part of how they manage their crop protection decisions.”

In Western cultures especially, she believes there are a couple of assumptions that people make about wildlife.

“One of them is that species are fairly homogeneous and that animals of the same species will react the same way, but they have a fair degree of individuality; and the other is that wildlife always prefers the wild, but there are usually individuals and even many species that thrive in human-inhabited areas.”

Rachel Davison, zoological manager at the EcoTarium, agrees that If animals under human care can adapt and be trained for complex behavior, “there’s something to be said for wild animals learning and evolving to better interact with humans and their environment.”

On the topic of bears, for instance, Krithivasan said, “one might find really shy individuals who would never dream of coming into urban areas and others who are really bold and will go after every bird feeder.” Davison pointed out

A moose on the loose in Worcester!

JOSEPH FORJETTE/GREATER WORCESTER LAND TRUST

Rabbits are plentiful in the Worcester

area. GREATER WORCESTER LAND TRUST A bear that was roaming the area of Hilma Street in 2019 – at one point making its way into a tree – was tranquilized by environmental officials. The black bear was relocated to a nearby forest, according to the state Division of Fisheries &

Wildlife. STATE DIVISION OF FISHERIES & WILDLIFE