- Born
- Birth nameMax Deitch
- Height5′ 5″ (1.65 m)
- Max Casella was born in Washington D.C. to David Deitch, a fiercely political journalist and second-generation Jewish immigrant to The Bronx, and Doris Casella, a social worker and activist from Long Island and daughter of Italian fashion designer John Casella.
His father's writing for The Boston Globe, among other publications, took the family of four to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they lived through Max's high school years.
Casella's acting career began with iconic roles; he filmed Disney's Newsies while on set breaks from playing Vinnie Delpino on the series Doogie Howser, M.D., and has since added every category to his arsenal, from Broadway, Shakespeare and an Ethan Coen play on stage, festival hits to blockbusters in film, video game voicing, and many memorable characters in culturally-iconic period television shows.
Most recently, Max starred in the Onur Tukel masked indie film Scenes From an Empty Church made during quarantine, opposite Blake Lively and Jude Law in The Rhythm Section directed by Reed Morano, and in Sundance favorites Late Night by Mindy Kaling and Night Comes On, starring Dominique Fishback and directed by Jordana Spiro. Other film credits include the Academy Award-nominated Jackie with Natalie Portman, Woody Allen titles Wonder Wheel and Blue Jasmine with Cate Blanchett, Ben Affleck's crime drama Live By Night, Spike Lee's Oldboy, the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, Tukel's Applesauce, The Last of Robin Hood (as legendary director Stanley Kubrick), Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly, Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road, Harold Ramis' Analyze This with Robert DeNiro, Tim Burton's Ed Wood, and Newsies. As a filmmaker himself, he's collaborated with friends on independent marvels, most notably a folkloric showcase of Italian musicians by John Turturro called Passioné.
On television, Casella spent five seasons on The Sopranos as Benny Fazio and was a series regular on HBO's Vinyl, as well as in Woody Allen's Crisis In Six Scenes, NBC's Shades of Blue, and HBO's Boardwalk Empire. He recurs on Amazon's award-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and on seasons of Ray Donovan and TBS' The Detour.
Casella made his Broadway debut as Timon in the original cast of Julie Taymor's Tony Award-winning musical The Lion King, for which he received a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Broadway Debut and a Drama Desk Nomination. Often getting cast in shows for which he plays multiple roles, his many stage credits include Ethan Coen's collection of vignettes 'A Play is A Poem' with the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, Simon McBurney's stage adaptation of the Robert Evans autobiography 'The Kid Stays In The Picture' at the Royal Court Theatre in London, Public Theatre's Shakespeare in the Park production of 'Troilus And Cressida', and as Nick Bottom in Julie Taymor's critically acclaimed production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' at Theatre for a New Audience, which was filmed for theatrical release by Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. As a member of the LAByrinth Theater Company, he starred alongside Ellen Burstyn in The Atmosphere of Memory, and at BAM in Endgame with again longtime collaborator John Turturro; they as well led Souls of Naples, which then toured to Italy as the country's beloved play. Later in Italy, Max starred in and curated music for John's and his adaptation (with Katherine Borowitz and Carl Capatorto) of author Italo Calvino's folk tales, Fiabe Italiane.
An animated storyteller and illustrator, Max is writing a TV series and other works about being raised by raucous iconoclasts while living with pituitary dwarfism, a hormonal condition that inhibits growth, and that in fact accounted for his eligibility for many of the roles he landed as a "child actor" when in his twenties.
He has two children, Mia and Gioia, with educator and set teacher Leona Casella.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Annie McCain Engman
- SpouseLeona Casella(February 7, 2002 - present) (divorced, 2 children)
- ParentsDoris CasellaDavid Deitch
- Chameleon-like ability to change his appearance with every role.
- Although he often plays New Yorkers, he actually grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents are from New York and they taught him to speak with a New York accent. He moved to New York after high school and has lived there for most of his life.
- His father's ancestry is Jewish and his mother's is Italian. Max was raised by his mother; he was never that close to his father so Max took her name, Casella, before he ever thought about having a career. His birth name is actually Max Deitch.
- Was in the original Broadway cast of "The Lion King" playing Timon. Won the Theatre World award for Outstanding Broadway Debut, as well as a Drama Desk nomination.
- (December 2000-2001) Co-Starred on Broadway in "The Music Man" as Marcellus Washburn.
- Alumnus of the AADA (American Academy of Dramatic Arts), Class of 1987.
- I feel like every character that I play is a version of myself. I put the clothes on, the shirt and the bell-bottoms and the big belt, and I have my hair all out and the beard -- and I just become. I start playing make believe, and it's something that I've done since I was a little boy. It comes quite naturally.
- When I was 12 years old I did a play for high school, even though I wasn't in high school yet, and I really liked that. Up to that point I was into drawing and I thought I was going to be an artist. Then I just liked acting a little too much, so I started doing a lot of plays in and around the Boston Area. When I graduated high school I moved to New York City, got an agent and started to pursue it full time.
- [on child acting] By the time I did Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989), I had been acting for 10 years. I already knew I wanted to be an artist and emulate Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jon Voight... I wanted to be a serious actor. I started very young, I started acting around 12 years old doing plays. My background is the theater, and I studied acting seriously. Throughout my career I've gone back to study. So when I got Doogie, I was not a child. I was already college-age, out-of-college-age. When you see child actors who don't go on to have careers, it's because they weren't actors. They were kids who were cute and had a charisma about them, but they didn't really want to do the work. The show ended, and they wanted to go back to their lives, because they weren't really actors. Neil Patrick Harris and I were actors to begin with.
- I think there's way too many superheroes movies. I don't like to be watching a show, say about hospitals, and people who do open heart surgery look like fashion models. I don't like that kind of artifice. Which is there not by accident. It's there because people must like looking at pretty people and not thinking about anything. When I go to the emergency room, nobody looks like that. Nobody talks that way. That stuff really bugs me. When a show really gets it right, that's special.
- [explaining his process of getting into a character] You come in prepared and with a point of view, but mostly with an openness to play with your partners. You don't come in with a preconceived set plan. The worst thing that you can do is to have a plan and try to stick to it, cause other people will come and all of a sudden -- they've messed up your plan. When you're home alone and you're preparing for the scene, you have to be completely open to the unknown of what your friends are going to be doing when you get there, and that's what's fun.
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