‘I make people nervous’: The veteran villain who hides in plain sight

If you saw him at this week’s Emmys, sharing the stage with Kathy Bates and Antony Starr in a celebration of TV’s greatest villains, you’ll know the character Giancarlo Esposito gets asked about the most when off-screen: Breaking Bad’s buttoned-up sociopath, Gustavo Fring.

“You guys are such huge fans over there of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, it’s always nice to be around people who understood those shows,” Esposito says from New York City, his home since his parents emigrated from Copenhagen when he was six.

Antony Starr (left), Kathy Bates and Giancarlo Esposito at this week’s Emmys.Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

One of TV’s iconic baddies, Esposito brought a cool but vicious bent to the Chilean-American druglord-slash-businessman across eight seasons of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul combined, between 2009 and 2022.

While Fring had the sort of brutal send-off most actors can only dream of, Esposito’s five-decade career is filled with distinctive performances, from on-the-block characters in his collaborations with Spike Lee – like the hothead Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing (1989), who had ’90s kids yelling “You stepped on my Jordans!” in playgrounds everywhere – to his turns as a vampire (Abigail) and skeezy Hollywood lawyer (MaXXXine) in two recent horror movies.

“There was a line that [series creator] Vince Gilligan wrote that inspired Gus Fring on Breaking Bad, which was, ‘Hiding in plain sight’. I loved that, and I feel it’s in a lot of my characters,” says Esposito.

“I come on screen and immediately make people a little anxious, a little nervous, on the edge of their seats, because something is going to happen.”

Esposito as Gus Fring, one of TV’s greatest baddies, in Better Call Saul.Credit: Sony Pictures Television

This weekend, the 66-year-old will appear at Oz Comic-Con Sydney, where Fring will no doubt be a key topic of conversation. And next week, cinemagoers can see him in Francis Ford Coppola’s already infamous Megalopolis, where he plays conservative bureaucrat Frank Cicero. The film was a reunion for Esposito and Coppola – the actor had a bit part in the director’s 1984 box-office bomb, The Cotton Club.

“It was certainly interesting. Francis is a man of big ideas, some of which he shares with you and some of which he does not,” Esposito laughs. “He encourages you to go along for a ride that you don’t know where the destination is. He says, ‘Let’s find it together’, which is sometimes difficult for an actor. But it encourages you to trust.

“Francis used to text me every single morning at 6am, saying, ‘It’s like what Crassus did back in Roman history!’ It’s like that, so complicated. But it was all encouragement and love and I enjoyed working with him.”

Esposito mentions a moment where he and Coppola disagreed on a scene decision. Coppola is currently involved in a lawsuit against Variety, which, in July, published a story describing the director’s on-set behaviour as “unprofessional”; Coppola has denied any wrongdoing.

Esposito in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.Credit: Phil Caruso/Lionsgate

“I had a scene where my daughter had to sit on my lap. He wanted that. And I went, hmm, in today’s world, I don’t know. It’s my grown daughter, played by Nathalie Emmanuel. So I said, ‘Nathalie, how do you feel about this?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, it feels a little funny.’ And I said, ‘Francis, you know, I got grown daughters in their 20s and none of them sit on my lap, it’s wrong!’

“But by the same token, when my father was alive – Italian, olive skin, Neapolitan – we’d kiss each other on the lips! We’d hold hands. That’s the culture. So I understood what he wanted, but I felt like it might be perceived by the audience as awkward and weird. But we did it, went to the screening, and it looks completely freaking natural. It looks fine. Here I was, worried about how it might be perceived, but as an actor, I can’t worry about that.”

A buck to the nepo-baby discourse of recent years, Esposito was born into the business: his African-American mother was an opera singer from Alabama, his father a stagehand from Naples.

Esposito playing Buggin’ Out in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

“There was always opera playing in our home; my mother was always rehearsing her arias. She was the real force behind me entering show business,” he says.

“My father was a stage technician – carpenter, lighting man – who loved opera, musicals, literature. When you grow up in a household like that, you get to experience play on a different level and a real appreciation for the musicality of life. My grandmother, Mahalia, was a prima ballerina in the ballet in Naples, and so it’s in my blood to be this storyteller.”

Even so, his pathway into the arts wasn’t always assured. “I thought at one point, I would be a chiropractor; I like the homoeopathic, natural healing arts,” he says. “And then I was really interested in Shackleton and archaeology, people who mapped the world, the explorers. At one point, I was invited to a seminar in Washington at the Explorers Club,” he says of the elite club founded in 1904, which counted Sir Edmund Hillary and Neil Armstrong as members.

“To me, that would have been a viable life and career, and I think I may have been good at that. But I’m a communicator, and so for me to have become a storyteller in so many ways is really apropos.”

Of his four daughters with ex-wife Joy McManigal, three have followed in the family’s footsteps: one is a filmmaker who recently worked in the camera department on Spike Lee’s latest movie with Oscar-winning cinematographer Matthew Libatique, another is a singer-songwriter, and another has just finished the agent training program at CAA (the eldest, meanwhile, is a social worker). “My third daughter Syr says she can feel the dynasty’s beginning, it’s starting to happen,” Esposito says.

Giancarlo Esposito as Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian.Credit: Disney+

While the fanboys and girls at Comic-Con might want to discuss Esposito’s turn as Moff Gideon in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian or his pivot to the Marvel universe playing Sidewinder in the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World, for an actor so tied to downtown New York’s indie renaissance of the ’80s and ’90s, he’s a talisman.

What’s his take on Spike Lee, for example, with whom he’s made five films? “Genius,” says Esposito.

Jim Jarmusch, director of the 1991 classic Night on Earth, in which he played a passenger in a New York taxi? “Underground. Provocative.”

Madonna? (The pair appeared together in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan.) “Innovator,” says Esposito.

Steve Buscemi? “Buscemi’s an old friend. A lot of us came up in the New York theatre, so that is a club unto itself,” says Esposito. “Edie Falco, [William H.] Macy, Ellen Burstyn. We run into each other often, usually on a film set.”

Filmmaker Abel Ferrara, with whom he made King of New York (1990)?

“Madman!” Esposito says. “Abel is the most creative madman I’ve ever met. Saw him this year at Cannes. He’s living in Europe, he’s in a great place, doing his art. I hope he can get someone to give him money to make another film one day. But he’s certainly come into his own and calmed down and he’s a very talented artist.

“Look, there are people who are artists who understand how free you have to be in your creativity to create something that’s not you, or just a representation of you but not completely you. You have to be a little crazy to do what we do.”

Which brings us to Mickey Rourke, with whom Esposito worked on Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991).

“Powerful!” says Esposito. “Undercut, uppercut, sidecut. He’s a very particular human being who I happen to get along with and enjoy greatly. He’s difficult for many people, but I think he’s a brilliant actor. I loved working with him, and I loved breaking up the fights between him and his nemesis on that movie, Don Johnson.”

Giancarlo Esposito will appear at Oz Comic-Con Sydney on Saturday and Sunday.

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