5 Latino Stars Who Don’t Identify as Latino

Getty Images

Tony Mendez

A lot of people were ticked off when Ben Affleck opted to cast himself as Tony Mendez—the real life CIA agent that inspired this year’s Best Picture winner ‘Argo’—because it was believed that Mendez, was Latino. But in a recent interview with NBCLatino.com, the real Mendez (birth name Antonio Joseph Mendez), defended Affleck’s decision to cast himself (and not a Latino) in the role. “I don’t think of myself as a Hispanic,” Mendez explained. “I think of myself as a person who grew up in the desert. If I had been in a different family circumstance, I might have felt that way," he said. Still, when Mendez was asked specifically where his family was from, he said, “My great-grandfather came from Italy and he married an Irish woman and there was a French connection there. So, that’s my mother’s side. On the other side, on my father’s side, his family was originally from Mexico.” (That sounds pretty Latino to us!).