2 weeks Ago By Robert Moran
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..
