UPDATE: A new report claims that Esposito will be starring in the unannounced Far Cry 6.
Giancarlo Esposito, who played Gus Fring in the lauded TV show Breaking Bad, says he’s working on an upcoming video game, and it sounds like it’s going to be a big one. Esposito has already had an incredible year for his television work, with roles in The Boys, The Mandalorian, and Better Call Saul.
Esposito is perhaps most well known these days for playing Gus Fring, but his career stretches back decades and includes performances in some groundbreaking movies and TV shows. In recent years, Esposito appeared in Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho’s Okja. Long before that, he had a major season-long role in Homicide: Life on the Streets. While he sported a much different look back then, Esposito’s role in Spike Lee’s seminal 1988 film Do the Right Thing in many ways put the actor on the map. He’s even worked in video games before, portraying The Dentist in Payday 2.
Judging from recent comments by Esposito, his next video game role with be a much bigger deal. In an interview with Collider, Esposito said he worked on a “huge” game earlier in 2020, but he couldn’t give any more details about the project. However, he did hint that the role may be shaped by some impressive new kind of performance capture technology, saying that it involved a “new style of acting.”
While this upcoming mystery project will be Esposito’s first work in video games in a few years, one of his most recent TV roles included a bit of familiar video game technology. The visual effects in The Mandalorian used Epic Games’ Unreal Engine to power massive virtual sets, letting the actors on set react more realistically to the digital elements that appeared onscreen in the finished show. It’s possible that something similar to this technology is what was used to capture Esposito’s latest video game role, but he didn’t comment further on it.
Major Hollywood actors crossing over to video games performances isn’t new - take Jon Bernthal’s recent performance in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, for instance. Nonetheless, Giancarlo Esposito’s exceptional skill at playing some of TV’s most memorable villains from Breaking Bad to The Mandalorian makes his new mystery role exciting to ponder. It’s not out of the question that his character from The Mandalorian could appear in Star Wars: Squadrons or some other Star Wars game, but whatever the role ends up being, it should be worth looking out for.
Source: Collider