Biography
Joe Malone is an actor, director and writer who got his start playing Will Tatum in a High School production of The Mouse That Roared in Leonia, New Jersey circa 1983. The Leonia High School Library teacher was helping the Drama teacher enlist possible actors to appear in the play and asked Joe who said yes. He had never thought about acting before but got a small role in the play and started enjoying the rehearsal process. On opening night, although unscripted and a nuisance to the plot, Joe hammed it up upon entering the stage for the first time and did a fey Rapunzel like leap into the center spotlight, getting a huge laugh from the audience in the process (it sounded like a mouse that roared). Right then and there Joe was hooked and decided to become an actor for life. For his senior year at Leonia High School in 1984 Joe got one of the starring roles playing Kenickie in Grease. This gave him his first taste of singing and dancing on stage in front of an audience.
Upon graduation from high school, Joe went to the University of Southern California in 1984 to study acting and cinema. Joe starred in one short student film during that time called Friends. He also got an extra role in the 1984 Michael J. Fox movie Teen Wolf and can be seen hamming it up during the now cult popular famous high school teen prom dance scene. Joe subversively kept reappearing in all of the different shots during that scene wearing different outfits for each take, thereby ending up on the cutting room floor most of the time (and probably costing the producers of the movie thousands of dollars in the process! Sorry Joe was young and stupid then!). In fact Joe hopes the statute of limitations has run out regarding any liabilities involving that day. Anyway, After one semester he decided to transfer to New York University in 1985 to continue studying acting as well as film-making. It was there at NYU that Joe started getting a variety of acting roles, both in low budget films shooting in and around New York City, NYU student films as well as college plays. He also directed five student films and one short film during this time. Among the plays that Joe starred in were Bent, Victor Victoria, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Skin Of Our Teeth, and more. The first short film that Joe wrote and directed was The Man in 1986. Of interest, in 1987 Joe had a starring role in Bennett Miller's first NYU film called The Crossing.
After graduating from college in 1988 Joe went back to Los Angeles to star in a play that he also co-wrote called Testing Negative. This play confronted the then harrowing reality of AIDS from the heterosexual point of view and was well reviewed by the LA publications at the time. A September 8, 1988 review in The Los Angeles Times wrote "Joe Malone, is tuned in to the profane, pitiless chatter of extended adolescence. And the basic idea--to demonstrate how the threat of AIDS can ravage already fragile friendships, even among heterosexuals--is certainly more original than it would have been to write another standard-issue AIDS play." The review went on to say "The performance of Joe Malone, as a heedless young druggie, is impressively tough-minded as he makes no attempt to ingratiate." After the run of the play Joe was offered artistic agency representation from Progressive Artists (then Mickey Roarke's agency of record) and decided to stay in Hollywood for awhile auditioning for Hollywood roles. In 1989 Joe flew back to New York City to star in the short east village based film Chains. In 1990, while back in Los Angeles, Joe starred in the low budget feature film Bad Men that was filmed in and around South Central Los Angeles right before the now infamous LA Riots. In 1992 he starred in a Blank Theatre play production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The four person play also starred Noah Wyle of ER fame and Kim Walker of Heathers fame. It was also in 1992 that Joe started writing songs and rapping under the alter ego The Joje (The Joje continues to rap and sing as of this writing in 2017 and is in a rock and roll band called Chaos that debuted their first album called Guilty Until Proven Innocent last month).
After auditioning and making some short films, music videos and songs over a couple years in Los Angeles, California Joe decided to move back to New York City in 1994 to write and star in a comedy movie/food review show called Chowtime Video Review. Eight episodes of the half hour program were created and broadcast in 1994 and 1995 on the Manhattan Public Access cable TV program. Also in 1995 Joe starred in an NYU alumni theatrical stage play production of The Raft Of The Medusa. In 1996 Joe started writing and directing his first feature film called The Man (it was completed in 1998). The Man is a remake of the 1986 short film of the same name that he had made during his NYU days. In 2000, Joe teamed up with co-director Chris Diiorio and made a black and white documentary feature film called First Call which is about people who drink in NYC bars during the morning. Bars in Manhattan during that era still opened up at 8:30 AM (interestingly, the film has lived on as a historically time stamped nostalgia film about an era of New York City that doesn't exist anymore).
After starring in a pilot TV show called The Little Bastards in 2001, Joe took a break from acting/directing/writing/music to get married, buy a house and start a family. In 2010 Joe started to re-emerge and re-engage with his artistic talents, first by singing as The Joje with Chaos and then making a series of music videos. In 2014 Joe started production of his third feature film, Suburban Drug Lords, which is a sequel to The Man (1998) and features the same cast of characters in the same environment, 19 years later. Joe recently completed Suburban Drug Lords in 2017 and as of this writing is starting to take it out on the film festival circuit. He is also in preparation to start production on his next feature film, tentatively entitled Skirting Winter.
