"I never thought I'd live to say this," John Leguizamo says in an almost confessional tone, "but I don't mind L.A. now."

A Broadway baby, tutored in one-man stage work by the likes of Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray, Leguizamo is so New York, the admission is almost shocking.

But then he qualifies it.

"Of course, all my friends are from New York when I go down there, or from Latin America. I gravitate toward the artists, the beautiful renegade rebels, y'know what I mean? And I still live in New York to keep my soul intact."

The important thing is that L.A. -- and the film business -- still makes him angry. And every few years, when he gets angry enough about something, he drags it out onstage, going back to Spic-O-Rama, his fledgling rant about the depiction of Latinos in pop culture.

"I gotta write about what bothers the f--- out of me and that's what ends up being the show," says Leguizamo, who's currently heard as the voice of Sid the sloth in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, and whose John Leguizamo Live hits the Toronto Just For Laughs festival this week as part of a two-month haul from New York to Santa Fe.

"Like, y'know, Freak had a lot of abuse in it. I made it hilarious, if you can make abuse hilarious. I was beat up a lot at home and in the streets. And Sexaholic was about all my sexual failures and the death of my grandfather."

And then there's Leguizamo Live, the onstage version of his book Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends -- a book that named names and which he now characterizes as "career suicide" (although you couldn't tell by the sheer volume of film and TV work he still gets).

"I started writing the play first, then I wrote the book, and then I went back to the play. The play is mutating as I'm doing it, a process that'll probably take two years."

As for naming names, he says "it was kind of stupid of me, and masochistic" (though the names remain in the play). I heard Steven Seagal wants to punch me in the face." I tell Leguizamo that I've met Seagal, and he has one of the limpest handshakes I've ever felt.

"And he runs like a girl," the actor adds, "but he will punch you like a f---- six-foot-five m-------!

"Anyway, he's still in the play. And I heard Patrick (Swayze) is angry at me, and I tried to reach out to him and tell him, y'know, it was more about my arrogant, cocky youth. And I heard (Sean) Penn is angry, and that hurts, 'cause I didn't say anything other than what a crazy method actor he is. But I guess it just hurts to be talked about."

Leguizamo Live is not about name-dropping, he says. "Only the stories that are important as to my development are in the play. It has to have a real reason to be there." On a direct level, he says Pimps, Hos and Playa Hatas references "the crazy orgies we had in Romeo + Juliet (with Leo DiCaprio) and Casualties of War (with Penn). We were just crazy young dudes doing crazy sh-- all in a room, getting girls to whatever.

"But I also meant 'Hos' as a metaphor for 'representation,' what they call handlers for actors, wranglers, just the parasitic level of people that prey off actors and take our money and feed on our insecurities and vanity. That's what I'm struggling with in the play, trying to find a clean perspective."

The play is nowhere near ready to be reviewed, he says. "It takes me a long time, I'm trying to do something masterful. To this point, I've done it in a lot of colleges, and the response has been pretty amazing. But they're college kids and they're drunk.

"On the other hand, it's a perfect audience for people that want to hear about a career, and the ups and downs -- the real ups and downs not the fluff bullsh--. They're really grateful for it."

John Leguizamo Live opened last night and continues through Saturday at the Berkeley Street Theatre.

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