Joe Mantegna: from Mamet’s predator to America’s FBI father

The monologue that won Joe Mantegna a Tony Award is not a speech. It is a siege — Richard Roma working a stranger in a Chinese restaurant, constructing a false friendship out of words like bricks, until the man has agreed to invest in real estate he cannot afford and does not want. Mantegna performed it so many times in Glengarry Glen Ross that audiences stopped clocking the craft and started feeling the wrongness of it — the way a con works on you whether you know it’s happening or not. That quality, something dangerous wearing the face of something familiar, has followed him from the stage to the screen for five decades.

He grew up in Chicago, the son of a Sicilian immigrant who had come to Illinois in search of the same thing Richard Roma eventually sells: a better life. His father died when Mantegna was in his twenties, and his Italian-immigrant mother lived to 101, long enough to watch her son become a television fixture. The Goodman School of Drama at what is now DePaul University became his formation ground — though he left just before graduation in 1969 to start working, a decision that says more about how urgently he needed to act than how carelessly he regarded credentials.

His breakthrough came through David Mamet, Chicago’s other great practitioner of the loaded sentence. When Glengarry Glen Ross arrived on Broadway in 1984, Mantegna played Richard Roma with a precision that made the character’s salesmanship feel genuinely dangerous. The Tony Award he received for Best Featured Actor in a Play confirmed what Goodman Theatre audiences already knew: he could turn Mamet’s stripped-down language into something that landed in the body, not just the ear. The collaboration continued on film — House of Games in 1987 and Things Change in 1988, a film that earned him the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, where the jury recognized something specific about how Mantegna inhabited a simple man caught in an impossible situation.

Hollywood had uses for him beyond Mamet. He played Joey Zasa in The Godfather Part III in 1990, a compact role in a film Coppola never quite commanded, and the character had enough edge to land without overwriting the canvas. Starting in 1991 he began voicing Fat Tony on The Simpsons, the mob-boss character whose register — a specific Chicago-accented menace delivered with casual authority — has persisted across more than thirty years and hundreds of episodes. The 1990s also brought Bugsy and Searching for Bobby Fischer, films that confirmed his range but rarely deployed him with the precision Mamet had.

The move to television that began with Joan of Arcadia in 2003 — where he played Will Girardi, a police detective and father navigating his daughter’s conversations with God — was a signal of where his career was heading. When he joined Criminal Minds in 2007 as FBI Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi, the author-turned-profiler, he entered a role defined by competence rather than danger, authority rather than ambiguity. For fifteen seasons and more than three hundred episodes, David Rossi was designed to be reassuring. For viewers who came to Mantegna through that role, he is Rossi. For anyone who has watched him dismantle a room in Glengarry Glen Ross, the distance between those two versions of the same actor is the most interesting fact about his career. The domestication of his menace was a choice, and it came with a very large audience.

Criminal Minds was revived in 2022 as Criminal Minds: Evolution on Paramount+, and Mantegna returned as Rossi — now in a version of the procedural that allows for more psychological complexity and darker material than the original network run permitted. In May 2026, he directed a theatrical production at the Scherr Forum in Thousand Oaks, California: a one-man show about Lenny Bruce, the comedian who used language as a weapon and paid for it with his freedom and eventually his life. It is not the kind of project that a man who has stopped thinking about language chooses to direct.

His marriage to Arlene Vrhel, whom he met during a Chicago production of Hair in 1969, has lasted more than fifty years. Their daughter Mia, born three months premature and diagnosed with autism, has become an advocacy cause the family has pursued publicly and persistently — the Mantegna Family Foundation supports both autism awareness and veterans’ programs. Their daughter Gia has built her own acting career.

Criminal Minds: Evolution continues. The Lenny Bruce project is evidence that the theatre — where he made his name with a single, devastating monologue — has never been far from his attention. The career contains two Joe Mantegnas: the one Mamet found, and the one CBS kept. Whether the first one is still fully present in the second is a question only the work can answer.