Trust him — Ribisi only plays a ‘Sneaky’ character
NEW YORK – Playing a con artist doesn’t necessarily make you a good one.
As bamboozling ex-convict Marius Josipović in Amazon Prime’s Sneaky
Pete, Giovanni Ribisi pilfers, counts cards and dupes an entire family into thinking he’s their long-lost grandson. The actor insists he hasn’t picked up many tools of the trade on set, leaving the real trickery to the show’s hired magic consultant.
“I’m in my 40s — yeah, I’m going to change careers,” Ribisi jokes over chicken at a Midtown hotel restaurant. “No, at a certain point, you just leave it up to the professional who’s been doing it for 15 years because you can’t even compete with that.”
Having more than three decades of acting under his belt, Ribisi, 43, has established himself as one of the most chameleonic actors in the business: playing a courageous medic in Saving
Private Ryan, a hangdog junior broker in Boiler Room and Phoebe’s dopey brother on Friends. All ample preparation for his role in Sneaky Pete, returning for a second season Friday, in which he bounces between personas to keep his long con going.
At the end of Season 1 of Sneaky Pete, said to be among Amazon’s mostviewed series, Marius said goodbye to the Bernhardt family (led by Margo Martindale), with whom he moved in after assuming the identity of his former cellmate, Pete, in an effort to escape vicious gangster Vince (Bryan Cranston, the show’s co-creator). After Vince gets shot by an FBI agent in the season finale, Marius figures he’s off scot-free — that is, until a new band of criminals mistakes him for the real Pete, demanding the $11 million Pete’s mom stole from their boss. They threaten to kill the Bernhardts if he doesn’t recover their cash, forcing Marius to bust Pete (Ethan Embry) out of jail and enlist his help.
That high-stakes dilemma is the jumping-off point for Season 2, which explores more of Marius’ life before prison and the magnitude of his con operations.
“It leans into something that feels more like a heist story,” Ribisi says, with the lingering question of how much longer Marius can manage to fool the Bernhardts. “That’s one of the hooks of the show, but at a certain point, there’s only so long you can ride that wave. The show has to evolve and become about something else.”
Ribisi also directed the second episode, his first turn behind the camera aside from a music video for indie-rock band The Kills. Directing himself and managing a crew proved challenging, he says, but it fulfills a longtime aspiration that he plans to continue.
Directing has “been a big focus for me in the background while I have my day job, finding and developing the project I want to do,” Ribisi says, declining to provide details.
In the meantime, he’s gearing up for the four planned sequels to James Cameron’s Avatar, in which he plays corporate slimeball Parker Selfridge. He can’t say anything except to enthuse that they “absolutely surpass even the first one. In reading it, it’s almost unfathomable how they can do it.”