It’s mid-morning inside a media studio in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, and Guy Nardulli adjusts lapels of a gray three-piece suit. Photographer’s lights flash, but Nardulli—broad shouldered, grinning—barely notices. He moves easily, like a man who knows how to hold a room. Because he’s been doing it for decades. First as a football player, later as an actor, always the guy who remembers where he came from.
The shoot is part performance, part homecoming. A year ago, one of the first faces featured in this magazine. Now, in honor of our anniversary, Nardulli is back, seasoned, gracing the cover, a full-circle moment, like the role he’s about to bring home in his latest film, "Dirty Hands."
The Chicago foundation
Nardulli’s story begins in Harwood Heights, a postage-stamp suburb where everyone knew his family and Sunday dinners were as sacred as Mass. His father was a Chicago police officer; his mother, the keeper of a kitchen that still defines comfort for him. He talks about her cooking not in terms of ingredients, but ritual: pasta e piselli, pasta with onions and sweet peas, and pasta e lenticchie, a rustic lentil dish that carries the flavor of generations.
Football was his first stage. At Elmhurst College, he became a two-time All-American for the Bluejays, then carried the game overseas to Italy, suiting up for the Bolzano Giants before returning to play for teams in Ohio and Illinois. By 24, he’d closed out his career with the Chicago Thunder—earning a Hall of Fame spot as a free safety, number 24 stamped forever on his record.
When the pads came off, he made an improbable pivot. He joined The Chippendales, a detour that doubled as an education in presence, stamina, and commanding a crowd. “That’s where I learned to connect with an audience,” he says. The stage led to auditions; auditions led to television; and soon he was flying west with a new playbook.
Building the reel
Hollywood gave him the slow build: guest roles on “House,” “Criminal Minds,” “Monk,” even "Red Notice," where he shared the frame with Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds. There were cult comedies, indie thrillers, and small parts that stitched together into a living.
Then came “Tulsa King,” Sylvester Stallone’s crime drama, where he played Johnny the Zip—a swaggering enforcer who earned him fan recognition in places as unlikely as Costco. The blue pinstriped suit he wore for that role resurfaces at our photoshoot. This time, Nardulli smokes a cigar between takes, slipping easily between actor and character. “That show was special,” he says. “It gave me a character people really remembered.”
Dirty Hands, clean break
If “Tulsa King” opened a door, "Dirty Hands" kicked it in. Shot in Chicago, produced under his Safety24 Productions banner, the film is both career milestone and personal manifesto.
The plot is pulp: brothers Richie (Patrick Muldoon) and Danny (Kevin Interdonato) fumble a drug deal; Sheila (Denise Richards) finds herself caught between loyalty and survival; and in slinks Rodney (Nardulli), lion pendant dangling, jacket trimmed like a mane, comic bravado masking menace. When the kingpin’s son winds up dead, the brothers must claw through a single bloody night.
“It’s is about ‘lost souls seeking redemption,’” Nardulli says. The phrase anchors the film: a story shot in alleys and kitchens, where color is code and menace glints through neon. It asks whether redemption is possible when everyone’s hands are already stained.
But the pulp is the wrapper. What makes "Dirty Hands" sting is its aesthetic: colors functioning as second dialogue. Muted blues and grays drape the city in detachment, teal and neon bleeding through back-alley shots, crimson flashes mark irreversible choices, golden hues softening family flashbacks, and bursts of amber recall lost innocence. The palette isn’t just aesthetic, it’s psychological, reflecting characters’ descent into darkness while they’re fighting to preserve humanity.
Nardulli and Interdonato fussed over the color scheme, designing each frame to symbolize energy, decay, redemption. “We wanted it to feel lived in and dangerous,” he says.
Rodney was meant to be a minor role. But Nardulli expanded him into a lion—likable, almost funny, until the audience learns better. “You make him likable, then hate him,” he says, unapologetic. His performance lands somewhere between charm and threat, proof of his belief that villains are most dangerous when they grin.
For Nardulli, who co-produced through his Safety24 Productions, the film was more than just another credit. The company’s name is a nod to his football position and jersey number and marked not only his expansion into production but also a chance to shape the kind of hard-hitting story he loves.
He was able to channel the toughness he grew up around and capture a raw Chicago energy on screen. “That role gave me so much,” he says. “It felt like me. My city, my voice, my edge.”
Family, fittingly, found its way into the production too. His nephews play smaller roles, the kind of casting decision that blurs bloodline and film reel. And his mother made an appearance of her own—offscreen. During an early interview, when asked what she thought of her son’s gritty performance, she replied with sweet brevity and a heavy Italian accent: “It was very good.”
Momentum and pause
For two years, Nardulli lived at a sprint: “Tulsa King,” "Dirty Hands," "Death on the Brandywine," "The Corner," "A Christmas Spark." Then, silence. Five months without a booking. “I’m living a retired person’s life, and I hate it,” he admits.
The silence eventually broke, with a call from Netflix. He got cast in an upcoming series, five episodes shooting in New York.
The rhythm begins again. After that, a feel-good soccer film in the U.K., a far cry from bloody alleys but proof of his range.
And then? If he has his way, a romantic comedy. He imagines filming it in Mola di Bari, the seaside Italian town of his ancestry. He laughs when he says it, but the wish lingers—half joke, half destiny.
Family, food, football
Back home, Nardulli coaches the Ridgewood Rebels, the same football program where his jersey once hung. At our shoot, he pulls on coaching gear for one look, his old number displayed behind him, reminder and promise all at once.
Off the field, it’s family that fuels him. His Italian upbringing taught him both loyalty and love of food. He speaks of his sisters, of dinners with his parents, and never missing making Christmas eve panzerotti with mom.
And when it comes to dining out, his pick is La Scarola. “Armando and Joe are the best,” he says. “They even named a dish after my “Tulsa King" character—The Zip Pasta.”
Presley’s shadow
The toughest man in the room softens when he speaks of Presley, the pit bull-lab mix he rescued from a Los Angeles street. They spent sixteen years together. She calmed crying babies on airplanes, curled beside him through practicing lines, carried him across solitude. She died in June.
“I was laying with her. I saw the light go out of her eyes,” he says quietly. “But she’s still with me. I see her in my dreams every night.”
It is the kind of confession that makes his on-screen toughness both believable and forgivable: a man who knows loss, who plays villains but treasures loyalty.
Smoke, sky, Chicago
By the last look of the day—cardigan hoodie, T-shirt, cigar—Nardulli leans against a distressed rooftop wall, the skyline stretching around him. He surveys the city like Rodney might, but grins like himself: a man who belongs here, who always has.
A year ago, he was in these pages as a rising star. Today, he stands taller: actor, producer, coach, son, brother. Next week he’ll fly east with a script in hand. After that, another destination, another script. But tonight, as always, Chicago holds him.
For Guy Nardulli, this isn’t an ending. It’s act three—the return home, the rooting down, the building up. And Chicago, with its food, family and football, will always be the place where the story plays best.