Edward James Olmos may have gotten his start as an actor in the ‘70s, but it was in the ‘80s when he began to enter household-name status, thanks his work on both television ( Miami Vice ) and film ( Stand and Deliver ). By the 2000s, he’d found fame with a whole new generation through a completely different genre, playing Commander Adama in Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of Battlestar Galactica .
Now that he’s been in the business for a full five decades, it’s about time that Olmos started easing into playing the mentor, which he can be seen doing in the new film One Fast Move , now streaming on Prime Video . Alas, Decider only had a grand total of 10 minutes with Olmos, so we in no way had time to ask for anecdotes about the entirety of his filmography, but we did get all the details on the aforementioned new film and got him to talk a bit about his first film role, the actors who made him have to fight to keep from going full fanboy, and his political activism. DECIDER: To start with an obligatory question, how did you find your way into this film in the first place? Did [writer/director] Kelly Blatz reach out to you personally? EDWARD JAMES OLMOS: Yeah, they did.
They reached out to me personally and asked me to come in. They said that they had really had me in mind when they were doing the role and writing it, and I was very impressed with the script. It was intense, and I said to myself, “Okay, if the script is good, then you know that it’s augmented by filmin.