Much like Gus Fring—the steely drug lord he once played on Breaking Bad, and now plays again on its prequel series, Better Call Saul—Giancarlo Esposito is full of surprises. Play a gangster alongside him in a tense period piece, and you might just find him silently pulling out an ice pick while the cameras are rolling—a real weapon, and one that was very much not in the script.
Esposito pulled that very stunt on Laurence Fishburne while filming 1984’s The Cotton Club. “He came to me afterwards and he said, ‘Where did you get that? That freaked me out! You’re crazy!’” Esposito laughed during a recent phone conversation. “It scared the piss out of Laurence, but that’s like, how I work. I found it on the set; it worked for my character. I put it in my jacket to scare the fuck out of you.”
Such methods, Esposito acknowledged, have given him a reputation for being something of a dangerous actor, “because they don’t know what I might do.” Of course, that same edge is precisely what makes him so perfect as Gus, a man whose placid exterior masks the ruthless heart of a super-villain.
It’s been nearly 10 years since instant fan-favorite Gus made his onscreen debut on Breaking Bad, and a little more than one year since he popped up again on Saul—after months of foreshadowing and breathless buildup. Yet even the most diehard followers of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s small-screen universe still don’t know much about the character’s past, beyond the most basic biographical facts. Gus is from Chile; he sells both addictive fried chicken and even more addictive meth; he spent years nursing a grudge against fellow kingpin Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), who murdered Gus’s onetime business partner, Max Arciniega (James Martinez), in cold blood sometime in the 80s. (Though the Breaking Bad fandom has long speculated that Max and Gus were more than co-workers, Esposito is of the mind that they weren’t romantically involved.)
But that will change to some degree on this season of Saul, which premieres on AMC August 6. According to Esposito, the show this year will unveil a few key elements of Gus’s backstory, details about his impoverished childhood that will help explain what drove him into the messy business of the drug trade—as well as “why he pursues his power in business and his manipulation of people.”
Though some may be hungrily anticipating each drib and drab of Gus’s origin story, disclosing more information about Gus also carries a major potential pitfall. In his original Breaking Bad incarnation, Gus was terrifying and unpredictable because the show largely kept his inner life and motives shrouded in mystery. Learning what makes him tick could round the character out, but it could also sap Gus of his power—a worry Esposito himself had before agreeing to reprise the role on Saul.
In fact, the first time he was asked to come back, Esposito said no, thanks. “The more you see him, the less you are excited to see him when he does something that’s instrumentally going to shock you or move you, or make you think,” he reasoned. Conversations with Gilligan eventually assuaged his fears, and convinced him that the Gus he’d be playing on Saul would be, in many ways, a different character entirely than who he was on Breaking Bad.
This Gus is younger, more hot-headed, not quite as clinically precise in his every move. “He’s not the Gus that has it all figured out during Breaking Bad, which is interesting to me,” the actor said. “I’m trying to create a guy you haven’t seen before, even though you have.”
This season, which brings crooked lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) several steps closer to adopting the mantle of criminal lawyer Saul Goodman, picks up precisely where the last ended. Jimmy’s brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), has killed himself in spectacular fashion after intentionally burning down his own house. Jimmy’s girlfriend and fellow lawyer, Kim (Rhea Seehorn), is struggling to reconcile her relationship with her partner’s moral laxity. Jimmy’s acquaintance Mike (Jonathan Banks) is going to work for Madrigal, a shady conglomerate with ties to Gus that should ring major bells for Breaking Bad devotees.
Meanwhile, Hector Salamanca has been incapacitated by a medical emergency secretly spurred by his lieutenant, Nacho (Michael Mando)—something that has not gone unnoticed by Gus. “Nacho feels like he’s covered his tracks, and [that] Gus doesn’t know anything; he doesn’t understand or even know who Gus really is,” Esposito explained. “And he’s about to find out”—the sort of revelation that rarely ends well for anyone but Gus.
Esposito’s laser-sharp intensity is all the more impressive considering just how full his dance card has been lately. This spring alone, he shocked and delighted Westworld watchers by popping up for a surprise cameo as an outlaw and Anthony Hopkins surrogate; returned to narrate Season 2 of Netflix’s Dear White People; and had a recurring role on the animated YouTube Premium series Dallas & Robo. He’s also got three upcoming movies in the can—as well as Saul Season 4.
That’s a lot of visibility for an actor who has described himself as a journeyman, and takes pride in his ability to disappear into a role. Does Esposito ever worry about himself the way he once worried about Gus—that he’s become so recognizable as Giancarlo Esposito that TV viewers and moviegoers won’t be able to believe him as a succession of different sorts of characters? That the better we know him, the less power he’ll have?
“Yeah, well, you know, look—that just makes me work harder, to be honest with you,” he said, pointing out that in the four films he made with Spike Lee early in his career, “my hair was different, my face was different. I really am a chameleon in that sense when I do my homework. So I’m dying for the role where you have to do a double take and go, ‘Wait a minute—oh my God, that is him!’”
