A New York stand-up with a rubbery face and a line in impersonations, whom the films kept casting as killers, pimps and dealers. The best known of those parts, Ghost's Willie Lopez, is a plot device, and the comedian was mostly left at the door.
Fi1m perspective
In Ghost (1990), Rick Aviles is the mugger whose killing of Patrick Swayze's character sets the whole story going. The film needs him for a few minutes and then it needs him to be gone, and everything that made it a hit, the grief, the pottery, Whoopi Goldberg, happens after he has done his job. Our review says the film earns its tears. None of them are for Willie Lopez, and none were meant to be.
That was the shape of most of his screen work. Aviles came up as a street performer and stand-up on the Greenwich Village nightclub and subway circuit in the 1970s and 1980s, where critics noticed his ethnic impersonations and a face that seemed to have no bones in it. His screen debut was Mad Dog in The Cannonball Run (1981), and he kept taking small supporting parts through the decade while hosting It's Showtime at the Apollo from 1987 to 1991. When the films called, they called for killers, pimps and drug dealers, tough New York men with a short lifespan in the script.
Two directors saw something else. Jim Jarmusch used his comic timing in Mystery Train (1989), as Will Robinson, and Brian De Palma put him alongside Al Pacino in Carlito's Way (1993), as Quisqueya. We have not reviewed either, so we will not weigh them here, but they are the parts that suggest what a fuller career might have looked like.
Later commentary points out that his roles kept Puerto Rican and Latino characters where films of the period liked them, as criminals and low-level figures, and Willie Lopez is the example everyone reaches for. Aviles, in 1993: "I can't believe they cast me as a killer. I mean, I'm a comedian. Why don't they cast other comedians as killers?" Watching Ghost with that in mind, we felt a small, nagging frustration on his behalf. Here was a man built for voices and faces, given a name, a street corner and a reason to be forgotten.
His last major studio job was Gatesman in Waterworld (1995), a film so busy building an atoll that our review did not single him out, and there is no shame in that. He wanted agents to bill him as the Killer Comic. The films only ever bought the first half of the billing.
Biography
Rick Aviles (1952–1995) was an American actor and stand-up comedian of Puerto Rican descent. Born Richard Anthony Aviles in Manhattan, New York, he began his career as a street performer and comedian on the Greenwich Village nightclub circuit in the 1970s and 1980s. He made his film debut as Mad Dog in The Cannonball Run (1981) and later hosted It's Showtime at the Apollo from 1987.
Aviles appeared in numerous films, including Mystery Train (1989) as Will Robinson, The Godfather Part III (1990) as Mask #1, Ghost (1990) as Willie Lopez, Carlito's Way (1993) as Quisqueya, Waterworld (1995) as the Gatesman and Joe's Apartment (1996) voicing a cockroach. His television credits include The Stand (1994) as Rat Man. He had a sibling, actress Angel Aviles.
