Ray Romano talks about his directorial debut, 'Somewhere in Queens'

Comedian Ray Romano, whose Long Island-set CBS hit, "Everybody Loves Raymond," put Lynbrook on the map of sitcom landmarks, makes his directorial debut with his seriocomic feature film, "Somewhere in Queens," opening Friday.

For the Forest Hills-raised star, 65, who has shined as an actor in both comedies and dramas, making the movie was "a fun experience, but I have to say it was nerve-wracking leading up to it," he told Newsday TV's Elisa DiStefano. "Once we got in there and started doing it, all that goes away and it just becomes you have to do it," he said.

Romano, who cowrote the screenplay with Mark Stegemann, stars as Leo Russo, who lives in Queens with his wife, Angela (Laurie Metcalf), and their son, “Sticks” (Jacob Ward), a high school basketball star. Leo is happy enough to work at the family construction business alongside his father (Tony Lo Bianco) and younger brother (Sebastian Maniscalco). And he's overjoyed when Sticks gets a chance to play college ball. But when Angela's breast cancer diagnosis threatens to derail Sticks' hoop dreams, Leo goes to great lengths to keep his son on path.

"It’s all based on real experience," Romano said. "It’s not really based on my immediate family. We were Italian Americans from Queens, but my parents were born here and they weren’t as traditional as what you see in the movie. But I married into that family 35 years ago!" he said of his wife Anna's clan.

"We were worried that we were making it a little too broad and exaggerating it a little bit, but we’re not. We’re not," Romano averred, adding with comic hyperbole, "Every month we had to rent Leonard’s of Great Neck because someone was turning 16 and it was like a wedding! And that’s the world I wanted to write about. And I drew on other things," he says, noting that one of his three sons "really plays basketball, and my wife is a breast-cancer survivor," having been diagnosed with stage 1 in 2010 at age 46, "and we’ve dealt with anxiety and social anxiety, and so it all comes from somewhere in my life."

The Emmy Award winner had recently suffered his own potentially life-threatening medical issue. "I just had to have a [heart] stent put in," Romano said on Monday's episode of comedian Marc Maron's podcast, noting he "got kind of lucky that we found it. I had 90% blockage … in the main artery — what they call the widow-maker." And while medication has lowered his cholesterol count, "Here's the kicker … my [blood] sugar level's up now! … I'm in the prediabetic zone!"

In happier news, his and his wife's daughter, Alexandra, one of their four children, "got engaged this week," Romano said Wednesday  on "Live with Kelly and Mark" — going on to joke, "I know my daughter; this movie has to make a lot of money this weekend! I mean, the doves alone…!"