News

As a rule, actors shouldn’t fear playing unlikable characters, as Nick Raio has discovered. “Taught to Hate” is a short film based in part on real stories of racially motivated crimes against immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y. In it, Raio plays a man who shares his racism with his nephew.“A lot of my stuff has been either comedy, a gangster, or a cop,” he says. “It was a great role for me, and I like the fact that I was doing something different and that there was a message attached to this film.”The casting notice, which ran in the Aug. 6 issue of Back Stage, called for a Caucasian male, 45–55, and Raio fit the description. At the audition, he read from sides and impressed director James Garcia-Sotomayer, who says he knew Raio was right to play Uncle Ethan “even though there were a lot of other great actors.

You’ll never look at Chinese food the same way again after you see Won Ton Baby!, writer/director James Morgart’s feature-film debut. Morgart sent along an exclusive teaser trailer and a first photo of the tiny terror from the movie, and you can check ’em both out below.

The movie stars Fango Radio’s Debbie Rochon as Madame Won Ton, who ran a brothel in the ’70s but his since converted it into a Chinese restaurant. Her daughter Lily (Suzi Lorraine, who was also a producer and came up with the story with Morgart) believes her father was an Asian man—little knowing he was actually an Elvis impersonator her mom had a fling with in ’76—and adopts the appropriate accent. And she’s carrying something else, too: a growth in her abdomen that turns out to be a fetal twin Lily’s body absorbed while she was in her mother’s womb.