The highly anticipated stripper flick “Hustlers” boasts several boldface names — Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, Julia Stiles, Cardi B — along with one of New York’s bravest.
That would be Mario Polit, who, when he isn’t hanging with stars on movie sets, is battling blazes as a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department. At his firehouse in Rockaway, Queens, his fellow firefighters have christened him “Hollywood.”
“Do I get my balls busted that I do this? Absolutely,” the 51-year-old tells The Post in his thick Noo Yawk accent.
“Hustlers,” out Sept. 13, marks Polit’s biggest screen role to date. The film follows a group of ambitious strippers who team up to scam their wealthy Wall Street patrons. Polit plays Detective Hernandez, who’s hot on their trail.
The firefighter shot his scenes in 10 days over five weeks. When he shared a scene with Lopez, he made sure to make an impression, gifting her FDNY T-shirts for her, her fiancé Alex Rodriguez, and all four of their kids.
“She was very taken back by that,” says Polit, who lives in Long Beach, LI, with his wife, Tonya, and their 10-year-old daughter, Mia Rose. “She was very touched.”
Raised in Middle Village, Queens, Polit got the performing bug long before he joined the FDNY. He was 23 when he saw his older brother, José, in a community theater play, and within a week, signed up for acting classes at Manhattan’s HB Studio. Some six years later, he landed his first film role, playing a car thief in 1997’s “The Devil’s Own,” starring Harrison Ford. The credits list Polit, whose heritage is Ecuadorian, as “Young Dominican.”
“In the beginning of my career, I did all positive Hispanic roles,” he jokes. “I was a drug dealer, the prison inmate, the car thief, the rapist.”
‘Do I get my balls busted that I do this? Absolutely.’
After years of selling espadrilles at the store Unisa on Madison Avenue, he joined the FDNY in 1999 when his brother suggested that he’d be good at it. He was off-duty on the day of the 9/11 attacks, but his firehouse at the time, on the Upper East Side, lost nine firefighters. For the next 10 months, Polit took part in the search and recovery efforts.
In the 20 years since he joined the FDNY, his résumé has grown to include nearly two dozen films and episodes of TV’s “The Sopranos,” “Louie” and “The Deuce.” Next up, his two worlds collide as he plays a fireman in an untitled Judd Apatow comedy hitting theaters next summer. Polit hopes the one-two punch of that film and “Hustlers” will take his acting career to another level.
Still, he says, he’s not quite ready to retire from the fire department.
“I just feel I’m really lucky,” he says, “because I get to do two of my passions that I love.”
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