In Empire’s September 2018 issue, we caught up with The Naked Gun’s creative trio of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, 30 years since their slapstick opus hit the big screen. But they weren’t the only people we spoke to – in the film’s hilarious climax, Leslie Nielsen's Lt. Frank Drebin is forced to impersonate opera singer Enrico Pallazzo at the start of a baseball game. And when Drebin later unmasks himself as the game’s umpire having gone undercover on the pitch, an onlooker points and shouts, ‘Hey, it’s Enrico Pallazzo!’ So when we got the chance, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to chat to the man himself – no, not Enrico Pallazzo, but the guys who shouts ‘Hey, it’s Enrico Pallazzo!’ Or, as he’s otherwise known, Mark Holton.
Mark Holton has an eclectic CV: from Seinfeld to Star Trek, he’s the bit-part king of the screen. After getting into acting at his Oklahoma high-school he moved to Los Angeles in 1982, and by the summer of 1985 was lording over the box-office with, respectively, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (as bicycle thief Francis) and Teen Wolf (as Chubby).
But he is perhaps best known for The Naked Gun where, having seen Frank Drebin masquerade as opera singer Enrico Pallazzo, Holton, as a spectator, recognises him on the baseball pitch. “I jumped at the chance to do the film,” Holton, who was a big fan of Police Squad, tells Empire. “I thought, ‘My God, if it’s anything like the TV series, count me in, I don’t care if it’s one line.’” Which is just as well.
“Hey, it’s Enrico Palazzo!” shouts Holton. It was half a day’s work. And a star was born. “The film came out and I hadn’t seen it yet,” says Holton. “I would be going to auditions and people driving on the street would yell, ‘Hey, it’s Enrico Pallazzo!’ at me. It was quite puzzling. I thought, ‘What?!’ How did they remember that one line?”
After that, he got minor roles in a slew of shows, as well as the lead in 2003 serial killer film Gacy, for which he’d return home at night feeling “like I needed to scrub my brain out with a toilet brush.” He appeared as Ozzie in Leprechaun, and despite quitting the business over a decade ago, recently reprised the role in Leprechaun Returns. Now he’s thinking of joining the convention scene, allowing thousands of people to spot him across the room and shout that Naked Gun line at him.
“I love the film,” he says. “I was unaware until recently that it still has such a following. I was unaware that there are T-shirts that say, ‘Hey, it’s Enrico Palazzo’ on them. I’m still surprised.” A peculiar yet notable legacy.
Read Empire’s interview with Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker in the September 2018 issue, available online here{
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