Marin lights up his career with unlikely roles
Thirty years ago, as half of the wildly successful comedy team of Cheech & Chong, Cheech Marin was a pothead icon, a marijuana maharishi, a smoking sage. He and partner Tommy Chong starred together in movie hits with titles like “Up in Smoke” (1978) and filled arenas with fans who venerated them as the wacky wizards of weed.
“It was kind of a different time,” Marin, now 62, recalled. “People weren’t as uptight then.”
But it turns out that the Cheech Marin story isn’t one of an old toker who faded quietly into oblivion. Not hardly. Even after Cheech & Chong broke up in 1985, Cheech has never stopped working. He has supporting roles in movies like 1986’s “Echo Park” and 1996’s “Tin Cup,” worked in seven movies with the acclaimed director Robert Rodriguez, starred in his own short-lived TV venture “The Cheech Show” (1988) and was a principal player opposite Don Johnson on the CBS drama “Nash Bridges” (1996-2001). Plus, he was one of the principal voices in the Disney/ Pixar 2006 animated hit “Cars.”
The best part of the Cheech Marin saga, however, is the stuff that’s happening now.
How is this for unlikely? He’s playing a priest in a new made-for-TV movie showing on the Hallmark Channel, which is a little bit like, say, Meryl Streep popping up in a series on Spike. Moreover, the supporting role Marin plays in the Hallmark Channel Original Movie “Expecting a Miracle” that premieres at 9 p. m. Saturday is “the third priest I’ve portrayed in projects over the last year or so,” he noted.
Marin is at a loss to try to explain this odd turn of events for a guy who has long been associated far more with pipes than pipe organs. “Maybe I kind of look like a priest now,” he offered. “So I figure I’ll just take this new gig as far as I can. You read it here first: I’m going from dope to pope.”
Well, maybe not entirely. The other big surprise in Marin’s professional life is that he’s reunited with Chong after a roughly 20-year estrangement and has been on the road since September with a live show as Cheech & Chong that’s once again packing venues coast-to-coast.
The current plan has the show playing at least through April, appearing everywhere from Columbus, Ohio, to San Antonio, Texas, and Jacksonville, Fla. It’s their first tour since the early years of the Reagan administration.
“As soon as Tommy and I started talking again, we began to get this pressure from managers that if we ever wanted to do a stage show together again, we had to do it now. The time was right. Luckily, Tommy has kept his chops up, and even though he’s 70 now he’s still sharp as hell. We’re having a blast.”
Chong has notably struggled to find his post-Cheech & Chong footing and in fact served nine months in jail on a September 2003 conviction for openly selling marijuana bongs and other paraphernalia over the Internet. He’s still unapologetic about it, and his partner supports him.
“One day marijuana will be legal, and it will help solve all of our country’s financial problems,” Marin argued. “We certainly shouldn’t be incarcerating people for it anymore.”
Oh yeah, that’s another thing. If you guessed that age and political correctness had convinced Cheech & Chong to tone down the reefer stuff, forget it. Consider that this is the “Light Up America Tour.”
“We don’t have to censor anything because our material has transcended into the ‘classic’ field,” Marin emphasized. “It turns out we’re timeless, man. The stuff is as fresh as when we were doing it the first time. And 80 percent of the people coming to see us are between 30 and 40, which means they weren’t even born when we started out.”
Not that everything is the same as it was back in the Cheech & Chong heyday. Marin maintains that they’re “doing it smarter. We’ve got our merchandising together like we never did before. We’re also getting along just really, really well.”
Things are going so well the guys are even getting serious about doing another movie.
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