Actor Jay Jablonski enjoyed guest assignments on series including CSI: NY, Bones, and ER, but attained movie stardom courtesy of his multifilm professional partnership with writer/director Jason Todd Ipson, a child prodigy turned surgeon and professor of medicine at Tufts and Harvard University who found his true calling as a movie director. Jablonski and Ipson first collaborated on the medical-themed thriller Unrest, about a first-year med student confronted by a vengeful spirit, then reteamed in 2007 for the ethnic comedy Everybody Wants to Be Italian, with Jablonski as a fishmonger bound and tied to an obsession with an ex-girlfriend, who feigns being Italian to impress a blind date from Boston's North End.