Former tough guy Erik Palladino turns into a smooth operator as
ER's cocky but compelling Dr. Dave
Erik Palladino, clad head to toe in black, is sitting at a tiny round table
outside an L.A. restaurant called Red, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights and
pouring packet after packet of sugar into his black coffee. So this is how the
New York-bred actor who play Dr. Dave Malucci, a brash, cocky second-year
resident -- and first-year cast regular -- on NBC's ER chooses to
relax? "I know, I know," says Palladino. "It's not the healthy
image I should be projecting for a man of medicine. On the set, they're always
trying to get me to quit smoking. Especially Tony Edwards [Dr. Mark Greene],
who used to smoke until he started running marathons."
For his part, Palladino seems to prefer short sprints. "I recall in one
episode, his character has the flu and is attached to an IV," says
co-executive producer Dr. Neal Baer, "and [between takes] there's Erik
racing down the hall, clinging to the IV pole. He's the mischief-making
one," adds Baer. "He's a cutup," agrees fellow newcomer Michael
Michele. "While Erik is making all the jokes, I'm laughing hysterically and
egging him on. We both get into trouble."
That sense of
humor hasn't hurt his love life. "Erik's a good-looking guy," says
big brother Chris, 38, of the lanky 6-footer, "but more than that, he's
got the rap. He's so funny. He's always got the girls around." Palladino,
who puts in 12-hour days on ER before going home to the modest
one-bedroom L.A. apartment he shares with his mutt Daisy, describes himself as
"single and lonely," then laughs, remembering that he has a
girlfriend in England and another woman friend who just called him on his cell
phone. "God, women, I love 'em," he sighs.
He loves
his career even more. "I always wanted to be an actor," says
Palladino, 31, who grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., the youngest of three sons of
Peter, a Bronx heating contractor, and Queenie, a junior high school teacher.
Both his brothers --Chris and Todd, 36 -- work in the family business. Erik
might have too, had his parents not taken him, at age 12, to see Robert De
Niro in 1980's Raging Bull. "I felt like that was the most real
thing I had ever seen," he says. "I boxed too, so I really connected
with that movie. I'd been bugging my mom to let me act and she finally
agreed."
At 13 he won a berth at a children's repertory
company in nearby New Rochelle. But the raging bull in Palladino almost
trampled his ambitions. He and his high school friends, he says, "were a
little wild, but sometimes we ran with a group that was violent." A lot
of them, he says, wound up in prison. Palladino himself was busted at 17
("A guy said something about my long hair, and, well, I guess I hit
him"). After a year's probation, his conviction was expunged. "I
never thought for a moment he would ever really go bad," says his mother.
Palladino
also vented his energy as lead singer of brother Chris' alternative rock band,
No More Happy Faces. "He couldn't really sing," says Chris with a
laugh. "What he did was stage-acting to music." Acting won out when
Erik, then 18, enrolled as a theater major at Marymount Manhattan College.
After graduating in 1991, Palladino kept playing with the band while going on
auditions. In 1996 he became a veejay at MTV and later that year decided to
trim his grunge-rock locks. The new do paid off. A week later he became a
series regular on the FOX sitcom Love and Marriage, followed by a
recurring role on UPN's DiResta and two guest shots on CBS's Murphy
Brown.
His performance as an American sailor in U-571,
a WWII submarine movie surfacing to theaters this April, brought him to the
attention of ER. "I tell him, 'Don't let this go to your
head,'" says his mom, and Palladino is listening. Though he recently
bought his first new car --a Lexus-- "I like hangin' out on weekends on
my front stoop," he says. "You know, like in New York." As for
fighting? Fuhgeddaboutit! "I don't fight with people," he says,
grinning. "I'm an actor now. I gotta worry about my looks."
The pictures that accompanied the article are here.