Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito (born April 26, 1958) is an American actor and director. He has played Gustavo “Gus” Fring on the AMC shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, a role for which he won the Best Supporting Actor in a Drama award at the 2012 Critics’ Choice Television Awards and was nominated for an Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series award at the 2012 Primetime Emmy Awards.
He has appeared in Spike Lee films such as Do the Right Thing, School Daze, and Mo’ Better Blues. His other film appearances include Fresh, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, The Usual Suspects and King of New York. He has portrayed Sidney Glass/the Magic Mirror on ABC’s Once Upon a Time and Major Tom Neville in the NBC series Revolution. He has had roles in two Netflix original series: The Get Down, wherein he portrays Pastor Ramon Cruz, and Dear White People, which he narrates. He also voiced “The Dentist” in the video game Payday 2.
Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito was born in Copenhagen, the son of Giovanni Esposito, an Italian stagehand and carpenter from Naples, and Elizabeth Foster, an African American opera and nightclub singer from Alabama.
Esposito was raised in Europe until the age of 6, when his family settled in Manhattan, New York. He attended Elizabeth Seton College in New York and earned a two-year degree in radio and television communications.
Esposito made his Broadway debut (1966) at age 8 playing a slave child opposite Shirley Jones in the short-lived musical Maggie Flynn (1968), set during the New York Draft Riots of 1863.
During the 1980s, Esposito appeared in films such as Taps, Maximum Overdrive, King of New York, and Trading Places. He also performed in TV shows such as Miami Vice and Spenser: For Hire. He played J. C. Pierce, a cadet in the 1981 movie Taps.
In 1988 he landed his breakout role as the leader (“Dean Big Brother Almighty”) of the black fraternity “Gamma Phi Gamma” in director Spike Lee’s film School Daze, exploring color relations at black colleges. Over the next four years, Esposito and Lee collaborated on three other movies: Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, and Malcolm X. During the 1990s Esposito appeared in the acclaimed indie films Night on Earth, Fresh and Smoke, as well as its sequel Blue in the Face. He also appeared in the mainstream film Reckless with Mia Farrow, and Waiting to Exhale starring Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett.
Esposito played FBI agent Mike Giardello on the TV crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street. That role drew from both his African American and Italian ancestry. He played this character during the show’s seventh and final season. Mike’s estranged father, shift lieutenant Al Giardello, is portrayed as subject to racism, something Esposito’s character practiced in School Daze. Another multiracial role was as Sergeant Paul Gigante in the television comedy series, Bakersfield P.D. (Fox Broadcasting Company, 1993–94).
In 1997 Esposito played the film roles of Darryl in Trouble on the Corner and Charlie Dunt in Nothing to Lose. Other TV credits include NYPD Blue, Law & Order, The Practice, New York Undercover, and Fallen Angels: Fearless.
Esposito has portrayed drug dealers (Fresh, Breaking Bad, King of New York, Better Call Saul), policemen (The Usual Suspects, Derailed), political radicals (Bob Roberts, Do the Right Thing), and a demonic version of the Greek God of Sleep Hypnos from another dimension (Monkeybone). In 2001, he played Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr. in Ali, and Miguel Algarín, friend and collaborator of Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero, in Piñero.
In 2006 Esposito starred in Last Holiday as Senator Dillings, alongside Queen Latifah and Timothy Hutton. Also in 2006, he played an unsympathetic detective named Esposito in the 2005 film, Hate Crime. The film explores homophobia.
Esposito played Robert Fuentes, a Miami businessman with shady connections, on the UPN television series South Beach. He has appeared in New Amsterdam and CSI: Miami. In Feel the Noise (2007), he played ex-musician Roberto, the Puerto Rican father of Omarion Grandberry’s character, aspiring rap star “Rob”.
He made his directorial debut with Gospel Hill (2008); he also produced the film and starred in it.
New York theatre credits for Esposito include The Me Nobody Knows, Lost in the Stars, Seesaw, and Merrily We Roll Along. In 2008 he appeared on Broadway as Gooper in an African American production of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Debbie Allen and starring James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, and Terrence Howard.
From 2009 to 2011, Esposito appeared in seasons 2 through 4 of the AMC drama Breaking Bad, as Gus Fring, the head of a New Mexico-based methamphetamine drug ring. In the fourth season, he was the show’s primary antagonist. He received critical acclaim for this role. He won the Best Supporting Actor in a Drama award at the 2012 Critics’ Choice Television Awards and was nominated for an Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series award at the 2012 Primetime Emmy Awards, but lost to co-star Aaron Paul.
He appeared in the film Rabbit Hole (2010).
Esposito appeared in the first season of the ABC program Once Upon a Time, which debuted in October 2011. He portrayed the split role of Sidney, a reporter for The Daily Mirror in the town of Storybrooke, Maine, who is the Magic Mirror, possessed by The Evil Queen in a parallel fairy tale world.
Esposito appeared in Revolution as Major Tom Neville, a central character who kills Ben Matheson in the pilot. He escorts a captured Danny to the capital Philadelphia of the Monroe Republic.
Esposito also appeared in Community as a guest star for the episode entitled “Digital Estate Planning”. He performed again in the fourth season, in the episode titled “Paranormal Parentage”. Esposito has additionally appeared in a video of the action role-playing sci-fi first-person shooter game Destiny, as well as plays The Dentist, a non-playable story character, in the game Payday 2.
He has joined the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. He played Ra’s al Ghul in Son of Batman and Black Spider in Batman: Assault on Arkham. He had a recurring role in the first season of The Get Down on Netflix. In 2017, Esposito reprised his role as Gus Fring in the Breaking Bad prequel series, Better Call Saul. In the show’s second season, an anagram of the first letters of every episode name spelled out “FRING’S BACK”, which was revealed to be intentional by showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. Esposito appeared in a teaser for the third season portraying Gus as the Los Pollos Hermanos owner, officially confirming Esposito’s involvement in season 3.
Esposito married Joy McManigal in 1995; they later divorced. He has four daughters.
Written by Dianne Washington