Paul Raci grew up in Chicago, the hearing son of deaf parents. For Amazon's 'Sound of Metal,' his course was clear: No acting allowed

Paul Raci, co-star of “Sound of Metal” premiering Friday on Amazon Prime, grew up in the Chicago area with three siblings as the hearing son of deaf parents.

“ASL is my native tongue,” the actor and musician, now 72, says, referring to American Sign Language. His mother lost her hearing at age 5, after complications from spinal meningitis. His father lost his as a 5-month-old, also from spinal meningitis. Raci remembers his father’s friend bringing over a stack of 78 rpm records along with a phonograph one day, sometime in the 1950s. His mother, especially, missed the sound of music in a profound way. Raci took it as a “duty,” he says, to sing, and sign, all sorts of songs and singers for his mother: Sinatra, Elvis, and later, the Beatles.

“A lot of what my parents went through, their history, lives in my body,” Raci says. “I’m just a witness to what my father and mother’s lives were like, growing up in the Chicago deaf community.”

As a teenager Paul gravitated toward music and acting; he and his two brothers and sister also became heavily involved in the same community, and have worked as ASL interpreters in and among other pursuits ever since.

In the eloquent drama “Sound of Metal,” Raci delivers one of the year’s most intriguing and truly lived-in performances. He plays Joe, the calm, watchful leader of a sober house for deaf recovering addicts. Riz Ahmed takes the lead, beautifully, as Ruben, a punk-metal drummer who loses most of his hearing early in the story, and who reluctantly checks in to the facility while weighing his options.

The movie, filmed outside Boston in 2018, premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. There Amazon Studios picked it up for what turned out to be a pandemic-thwarted theatrical release, prior to Friday’s Amazon Prime debut.

Raci’s agent, he says, saw the audition notice for “Sound of Metal” and sensed a little kismet in the air. The actor submitted an audition tape. Ten days passed. The agent called the film’s production team. You get the tape?

Yes, but we’re going for a name. Robert Duvall, maybe.

Raci’s agent pleaded: Watch the tape.

Sure, they said. If we can find it.

They found it, they watched it, they loved it. Raci got the part.

“Darius and his (co-writer) brother, Abraham, wrote such beautiful dialogue, I just felt free to be real,” Raci says now. “No acting required. I mean, I’m a former addict; I’m also an interpreter. Riz is a great actor, and we were able to be vulnerable with each other. Darius told me: ‘No acting allowed.’ You can’t teach that, really. Twenty, 30 years ago, would I have been able to pull off the same scenes like that? No.”

In his early 20s Raci served in Vietnam, 1969-1973. He came home and, on the GI Bill, studied acting at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He co-founded the Immediate Theatre Company, inspired, in part, by the recently launched Steppenwolf Theatre Company and what he calls “(John) Malkovich’s shenanigans.”

A 1985 Immediate Theatre production of “Children of a Lesser God” drew this praise from Tribune arts critic Sid Smith: “Paul Raci and Janis I. Cole play this one for keeps, mingling craft and passion in a way that’s a little frightening, always believable and, in key moments, exceptionally touching.”

In 1989 Raci moved to the Los Angeles area. He’s currently in Burbank, with his wife, Liz Hanley Raci. “I came out here, I had my acting chops with all my theater work in Chicago, but I found out that they don’t have the theaters here that they have back there,” he says. Soon, though, he hooked up with the Deaf West Theatre troupe, while gigging around enough to rack up day-player credits on everything from “Baywatch” to “ER” to “Scrubs” to “Parks and Recreation.”

“Never got the leading roles,” he says. His performance in “Sound of Metal” may or may not change that. It’s beautiful work either way.

In the film, sober house director Joe challenges drummer Ruben’s viewpoint of deafness as an impairment to be fixed. “Culturally deaf people don’t want to be fixed,” Raci says. “They don’t feel impaired. They feel complete. That’s what Joe tells Ruben: Don’t try and fix it.”

Raci, whose musician daughter is 24, says that “the one thing I told (director/co-writer) Darius going in: ‘I hope you’re going to have some deaf people behind the camera, helping you.’ The phrase George Veditz used more than 100 years ago was ‘Nothing about us, without us.’” Veditz was a pioneering actor, educator and ASL advocate; his 1913 silent movie, “Preservation of the Sign Language,” is now part of the National Film Registry.

Decades ago, Raci’s heavy metal band Rocky used to play Harlow’s in Burbank, Illinois, among other venues, and the band toured to Champaign, Bloomington — “the whole college circuit.” These pandemic days, Raci continues his musical life by way of socially distanced rehearsals as frontman for the Black Sabbath tribute band Hands of Doom.

“We do the whole show in ASL,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing to see all these deaf people, all ages, watching the show. There’s so much great imagery in sign language. And that,” Raci adds, “is what sets us apart from the other 10 Black Sabbath bands here in LA.”

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“Sound of Metal” premieres Friday on Amazon Prime.

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