Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Giancarlo Esposito breaks down the careful way he made his villain Gus Fring so terrifying. Breaking Bad first premiered on AMC in 2008 and ran on the network for 62 episodes across five seasons. The show saw high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Brian Cranston) cook meth with his former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) after discovering his cancer diagnosis. These events set the stage for the duo's eventual meeting with Esposito's drug kingpin. The Vince Gilligan-created series got a spinoff, Better Call Saul, in 2015, which Esposito also was featured heavily in.
In a recent interview with GQ, Esposito shares the subtle way he made Breaking Bad's Gus Fring so terrifying.
The veteran villain actor says his time performing on stage plays a big role in his acting technique, which consists of slowing down his timing. He ends by saying that the best actors don't do anything, but they instead think and project. Check out Esposito's comments on how he played Gus below.
"So for me, my contribution was, I realized, you can't mess with the words, they were good. How do I slow my timing down. How do I slow my timing down, so I can hear more, so I can be contemplative, so I can allow space to affect me? When someone would say something to me, I wouldn't answer right away. I would really hear them, study them… The best actors don't do anything. You have to think it and project it.”
Giancarlo Esposito’s Villain Roles Explained
Esposito has experienced a lot of success in recent years with his chilling acting methods and abilities in villain roles. Breaking Bad saw him embody Gus Fring, and his acting, combined with the brilliance in every other area of the series' production, elevated the show to remarkable heights. Esposito's recent comments put his performances into perspective and inform the character he played. Gus' quiet, mysterious nature made him an outstanding and truly unpredictable villain.
Esposito's villain roles share a lot of similarities with Christoph Waltz, another tremendous character actor who often employs a similar technique to his characters. Esposito's villains do have range, though, and they're layered with their own backstories, which puts a lot of pressure on the actor to properly portray those nuanced feelings. In Breaking Bad, that is achieved in part through his long pauses as he mentally processes and assesses everything going on around him. It is clear he has a lot of things running through his mind, and that gives the impression of a methodical mastermind.
Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian is a more traditional villain, but like Gus, Gideon also has a past that stays with him throughout the events of the show. Esposito's Stan Edgar in The Boys often feels like the corporate executive version of a Gus Fring mindset. Both are equally calculated, but they operate in drastically different ways and environments. Esposito's acting journey has become a storied one, and the Breaking Bad star will return to the screen with The Mandalorian season 3 on March 1.
Source: GQ