R.I.P. Ángel Salazar, comedian and Scarface actor

Ángel Salazar—the Cuban stand-up comedian best known for his role in Brian De Palma’s Scarface—has died. His representative, Roger Paul, confirmed the death to The New York Times, revealing that the actor “had an enlarged heart and was found unresponsive” at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York. He was 68.

Salazar played Chi Chi in De Palma’s classic gangster film. His character is one of Tony “Scarface” Montana’s (Al Pacino) henchmen, who rescues the hopeful kingpin from certain death by rival drug dealers during the movie and goes out with him in a haze of blood and bullets at its end. While none reached the heights of the 1983 film, Salazar also starred in a number of other stage plays, television shows, and movies throughout his career, including De Palma’s Carlito’s Way (once again alongside Pacino) in 1993.

Salazar was born in Cuba in 1956 and fled the country by swimming across Guantánamo Bay in the early 1970s. From the U.S. Naval Base he reached, he was flown to Miami and then later moved to New York, where he was placed in a foster home in the Bronx. He performed in his first open mic night at 18 after struggling to find acting jobs in the city. “I had 10 minutes,” Salazar told The Inquirer of that very first gig (via NYT). “And I think I had one joke. The rest of the time I said, ‘Check it out,’ over and over again.”

“Check it out” would go on to become his signature phrase as his prop, costume, and impression-filled routines made him a regular in clubs across the city, and eventually in Florida where he split his time. He performed as recently as August 2 in Reno, Nevada, and his representative told the NYT that they had also discussed a potential future show in Chicago. 

Salazar was well-respected by his peers. In response to the news, comedian Adam Hunter posted on Twitter/X that he was a “comedy legend.” Comedian Jim Norton also said the following of him in Vanity Fair’s oral history of New York’s Comedy Cellar: “Auditions were typically done during the Friday late show, which meant you could get stuck following Ángel Salazar or some other guy who killed so hard the walls would shake.”