September 19, 2012
Finding His Depth
By Michelle Tauber
Once Homeless, Miguel Nuñez Jr. Appears in Three Summer Movies—and Offers Thanks for a New Life
Struggling-actor stories may be a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but in the early ’80s even that price tag would have been too high for Miguel Nuñez Jr. Leaving his hometown of Wilson, N.C., with three bologna sandwiches and a $127 paycheck from his job at a tobacco plant, Nuñez hopped a bus to Los Angeles. “I thought I would get here and it would be the Emerald City,” he says. “When I looked out the window and it wasn’t bright lights, that was the first time I realized the seriousness of what I had done.”
Broke and alone, Nuñez spent the next three weeks sleeping everywhere from a rat-infested movie theater to park benches. But his Yellow Brick Road has since smoothed out. After playing a witch doctor in Scooby-Doo and starring as a cross-dressing basketball player in Juwanna Mann earlier this summer, Nuñez, 38, is now appearing opposite his buddy Eddie Murphy in the space-age comedy The Adventures of Pluto Nash. “He has great improvisational skills,” says Nash director Ron Underwood, “and this great spirit.” Both came in handy in 1980 during the two months he was living on welfare and spending nights at L.A.’s Union Rescue Mission—the place where Nuñez now volunteers and runs the mission’s Thanksgiving food drive. “I used the system for what it was intended,” he says, “just a stepping-stone for where I wanted to be.”
