It’s Season 4 for the drug-dealing gangsters of “Raising Kanan,” streaming on Starz Friday, and Tony Danza is back as Stefano Marchetti, one truly tough dude.
“One of the things that drew me to do this,” Danza, 73, explained in a virtual press conference, “was I really wanted to work with the actor in the scene, Michael Rispoli who plays Sal Boselli. He’s a terrific actor.
“And I guess I just wanted to take a shot at trying to be a bad guy for a change.”
Set in the 1990s, a prominent theme in this fourth season is about identity. It asks in this violent milieu: How much are we the product of our upbringing, family, surroundings? How free are we really to be who we want to be?
Danza considered his character and his own self: “I think we try, not always successfully, but we try. I’ve tried. As I get older (and I am getting older!), I look back on things and I say, ‘Well, I wish this could have happened.’
“In the show, Stefano thinks he knows it all. He goes for it. That’s a big part of it. He’s living his life the way he wants to.
“I try. But life dictates. The plans of mice and men so often go awry.”
With a career that began in the ‘70s, is it at all odd not to be playing a character named Tony?
After all, his first breakthrough was as cab driver and part-time boxer Tony Banta in “Taxi” (1978-1983), followed by the long-running “Who’s the Boss?” (1984–1992) as former baseball player, housekeeper, and single father Tony Micelli.
“Yeah. Well, what am I going to do,” he acknowledged, “play ‘Dennis’? Come on.
“You know, in my life’s history of wonders, that may have been one of the big ones — that I continued to play Tony after Tony.
“But this character? I just really love this guy. I just think he’s a little different than the run of the mill. Yet he has a lot of those tendencies as well.”
That’s why Stefano rates as “a particularly fun guy to play.”
Danza has long been making like a song and dance man with a cabaret act. In addition to film and television, he’s a Broadway veteran with a singular ambition.
“I’m getting close to ‘Death of a Salesman.’ I had the incredible honor of doing ‘A View from the Bridge’ on Broadway with Arthur Miller when he was still around,” Danza recalled of the playwright of two revered classics.
“That’s one of the plays that I think about. You have to be a certain age to play him. I’m a father and a grandfather — I just had a granddaughter by the way.”
“Power Book III: Raising Kanan” S4 streams on Starz Friday