Actor Robert Davi writes, directs, and stars in The Dukes, a light-hearted caper about four aging performers, doo-wop sensations of their time, and their struggles to overcome a lack of meaningful work and wages. In 1963, Danny DePasquale (Davi) and George Zucco (Chazz Palminteri) were on top of the world with hit singles and sold-out houses. Now, they don't have enough money to see a decent dentist. After the last of many attempts to utilize their singing talents fails, the Dukes team up with friends Armond (Frank D'Amico) and Murph (Elya Baskin) for a different type of gig—one that involves a safe and a lot of gold!

Andrew McDiarmid: Being from Scotland originally before moving to the States, I can relate to the challenges of immigrant life. Your dad was born in Italy and your mother's family is Italian too. What was it like growing up in an Italian-American family in New York?

Robert Davi: I remember a period of time when everyone secretly wanted to be Italian! The closeness and spirituality of family and community is a strong tradition. Faith was the center point of the home for me. I had a good experience attending Catholic schools. I started in elementary, and after a year of public junior high, I wanted to go back!

AM: Do you think God had a hand in your switching from sports to acting and music as a teenager?

RD: You know, I always feel that it must have been God. I had gotten an illness out of the blue. It took me right out of the sports world and made me focus more on the art world. It was an incurable muscle disease. I prayed and my mom had prayed, and I just started getting better. I had a muscle biopsy that clearly revealed it. And now, whenever I get an exam, in the '80s, the '90s, and the 2000s, they say there's no trace of anything.

AM: After you decided drama was your passion, you lived and worked in Manhattan. What were you not getting at Hofstra University that you did get with famed actor and teacher Stella Adler?

RD: Hofstra was a terrific school and you get a taste of the potpourri of acting techniques out there. With Stella Adler, you've got the absolute source of the technique. She was the only one in America that had studied with [Constantin] Stanislavski directly. She brought that back to America and she was absolutely amazing and brilliant. I took technique classes and character classes with her—just an inspiration.

AM: Which approach defines your acting style more, Strassberg's quest for emotional memories to fuel a performance or Adler's insistence on organic, real-time, in-the-moment emotional intensity?

RD: I think you don't want to disconnect yourself from the moment. The memory exercises are great to do in preparation. But experiences are in you. As Stella believed, there's five thousand years of man in your blood—a blood memory. The more you exercise the imagination, the wider is your ability to interpret.

AM: I love acting and did a lot of it as well in high school. I remember one time, my group was doing a clinic a week before the final contest performance. There was no audience except the clinic coaches. I was playing the father in the play I Remember Mama, about a family of Norwegian immigrants living in San Francisco in the 1910s. I got so caught up in the emotions of that story that when the script called for me to cry, I actually did cry. The tears were real, the emotion was real. What do you call that, and can you remember moments like that when you really felt the character at a deep level?

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