"He has all these tools in his bag to get what he wants, and when he doesn't get what he wants, he throws a tantrum. Having kids, I know that."
Family often comes up with Facinelli. He says he "recently became Italian," securing dual citizenship to get back to his roots. He grew up in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens with Italian parents and three sisters.
"My three best friends were Cuban, and the other side of the fence was all Italian American," he says. "It was like 'West Side Story.' But I was able to be friends with both. I'd have arroz con pollo at my friend's house, and then I'd go have lasagna at my other friend's house."
This winter he'll be easy to spot in the much-ballyhooed "Twilight," a vampire-themed "Romeo and Juliet" story based on the best-selling novels.
Facinelli is proud of the work he has done, in whatever disguise was handy. "I get that a lot . . . 'I know you. You're an actor, right?' And then I've got to name, like, my resume. I just do it alphabetically now. Sometimes I'll list all the [obvious ones], and it turns out to be some obscure movie that no one has seen [but them]. 'You're the one that rented that?' "
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Where you've seen him
Peter Facinelli's first big splash was as the BMOC in the teen romance "Can't Hardly Wait" (1998) opposite Jennifer Love Hewitt. He graduated from that to his personal favorite, "The Big Kahuna" (1999), a three-hander with him, Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito as salesmen in limbo. He put the fresh-faced, naive businessman of "Kahuna" behind him by putting on 20 pounds of muscle and shaving his head to play the seething personification of addiction in 2000's metaphorical science-fiction extravaganza "Supernova" alongside James Spader and Angela Bassett. Later, he was the bearded traitor dude in "The Scorpion King."
