Attention Everybody: Lou Diamond Phillips Is Well Aware He Was in ‘La Bamba’

Rich asked Lou Diamond Phillips a simple question. When he's walking through an airport, what does he get the most?

Phillips didn't need to think about it. He just yelled it.

"Ritchie!"

Then came the part that says everything about four decades of public life. "Forty years of that, dude," Phillips told the show. "And everybody thinks they're the first one."

People sing to him too, though Phillips has learned to head that off at the pass. "Mostly people who don't know the words to La Bamba, which is fine," he said, before demonstrating the la-la-la approximation most strangers land on. "But yeah, got you. I got you. You can stop right there. I know where you're going with this."

The math on this is genuinely startling, and Phillips is the one who brought it up. They filmed La Bamba in 1986. It came out in 1987. Next year is the 40-year mark.

"I don't know where the time went," he said, "until I look in the mirror."

There's a reason the anniversary is on his mind beyond the calendar. A documentary called American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez is about to come out, and Phillips lit up talking about it. The film chronicles Valdez's rise from a farm working family to founding the Teatro Campesino, then writing Zoot Suit, which was a huge hit before going to Broadway, where Phillips says they didn't understand it. That road led to La Bamba.

The documentary also surfaced something Phillips had never laid eyes on. Audition tapes. His own.

"Meaning me auditioning for the movie," he clarified when Rich pressed. "Look at that skinny little kid. I mean, it's ridiculous."

He recommended it as a look behind the artistic genesis of the film, which is a generous framing from a guy who just found out footage of his younger self was sitting in an archive somewhere.

So how much of a résumé did that skinny kid have when he got the role? Phillips guessed a dozen or so credits. He'd started in the Dallas film industry while going to college at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he earned a degree in theater. His first professional gig came at 19.

That gig was not a movie. It was a comedy troupe called the Zero Hour, and the venue was a punk club at midnight.

"We would do these really raunchy Saturday Night Live type skits," Phillips said. "And if you weren't funny, they threw things at you."

Then he delivered the actual lesson, which is better than any acting-class anecdote he could have offered instead. "So not only did it make you good at comedy, it made you quick. And agile."

Rich, sensing the setup, noted that Phillips has a quick move to his left.

"Exactly," Phillips said.

Four decades on from a movie he filmed as a skinny kid with a dozen credits, the reflexes he built dodging objects in a punk club are still the ones doing the work. Somebody yells Ritchie in an airport, and he's already three steps ahead of the joke.