Lou Diamond Phillips offered me a hearty handshake and a heartfelt apology for being a few minutes late for our lunch at Sardi’s, the storied New York theater district restaurant where the walls are festooned with caricatures of past and current Broadway stars. But really, he had a good excuse: He was checking out his final edit of the episode of East New York that he had directed, one that was slated for airing in less than a month’s time.
There had been trouble with occasional rain during the on-location filming, he explained as the waiter neared our table, and that had forced director, cast, and crew to revise and improvise on the spot. In the edit, however, it had all come together smoothly—even a tricky scene in which two key characters managed to complete an extended outdoor dialogue without their umbrellas bumping together.
And now he was ready to celebrate a little.
“I’ll have a martini,” Phillips he told our waiter. “A dirty martini. Three olives.” Hey, he’s entitled.
And as we toasted, I noticed that, as I’d requested in our email exchanges, Phillips had indeed asked when he made reservation that we’d be seated at a table below his very own caricature, which had been added to the Sardi’s walls of honor when Phillips wowed critics and audiences as the lead in the 1996 Broadway revival of The King and I. So, of course, after we toasted each other, we mock-toasted the picture. And then asked the waiter to take a photo of us pointing at the picture. Trust me: Celebrity interviews don’t always begin on such a festive note.
Come April, Phillips will receive an honor of a different sort: He’ll be inducted into the Hall of Great (1988) and (1990), in which he played outlaw José Chavez y Chavez; (1991), an adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s novel that cast him as Navajo Police officer John Chee; (2004), a Hallmark Channel sagebrush saga co-starring Ernest Borgnine and Lee Majors; (2008), a made-for-cable oater with Phillips’ ex-soldier battling Stacy Keach’s corrupt land-grabber; (2009), a surprisingly satisfying remake of the classic John Wayne movie with Phillips impressively subbing for The Duke; (2019), a seriocomic shoot-’em-up featuring Phillips as a notorious gunslinger with an impeccable fashion sense; and , the 2012-2017 series based on Craig Johnson’s novels that featured Phillips as Henry Standing Bear, the supportive friend of Sheriff Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor) and proud operator of the Red Pony Saloon and Continual Soiree.
