Embarrassing Early Role Criminal Minds Star Probably Wants To Forget About
With a career that spans 5 decades, Joe Mantegna has been featured in dozens of movies and TV shows.
Perhaps best known these days for playing Special Agent David Rossi in Criminal Minds, the Chicago-born actor is also the voice of The Simpsons ' mob boss Fat Tony.
Prior to that voice acting role, he played Joey Zasa in The Godfather Part III and starred alongside Warren Beatty and Ben Kingsley in the 1991 mob movie Bugsy.
He even has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Film and Television from The Riverside International Film Festival in 2015.
But he's also got at least one skeleton in his acting closet that he would probably prefer remains firmly out of sight.
In 2001, Mantegna played Frank Garner in Turbulence III: Heavy Metal – a dreadful movie that obviously had almost no budget, even less box office success and holds a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
It's essentially a film about a terrorist attack on a plane carrying a heavy metal band and their fans. "Marilyn Manson fights Satanists at 10,000 feet," as one person described it. Sounds exciting, eh?
The whole movie was a disaster from start to finish. It looks and sounds like it was filmed on a mobile phone and is severely lacking when it comes to plot, acting, writing or creativity.
Naturally, being such a dreadful film, it's picked up a miniscule following of fans who view it as a sort of cult movie in a slightly ironic way. But in truth, it can't be described as 'so awful it's good' but as 'so awful it's just awful'.
And it wasn't just Joe Mantegna who made the regrettable decision to take part in the movie.
Other actors who 'starred' include the legendary Rutger Hauer, Gabrielle Anwar (who danced the tango with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman and went on to star in Burn Notice) and Craig Sheffer (who played Keith Scott in One Tree Hill).
Heavy Metal was the third in a series of three awful films, which calls into question why somebody of Mantegna's standing would want to appear in it.
Had there been the promise of a massive budget that would mean Turbulence III would be a film that might genuinely make it on the big screen, it might have been possible to understand why someone of his calibre saw it as a good opportunity.
As it was, there was never any hope of it being anything other than a laughing stock. And there can be no doubt that his involvement now makes the American/Italian actor cringe.