Giancarlo Esposito is used to frightening people. After all, he’s built a career out of it. Once, while on a flight, a woman waiting for the toilet saw him coming up the aisle and was so scared that she begged him to go before her. Bemused, he did: “I came out and said, ‘Have a nice piss!’” Even the tallest, most muscular men who approach him admit they feel intimidated in his presence. “My talents are facial expressions and intensity,” he says. “A guy last weekend said, ‘Wow, you’re not a big man, but you’re so frightening!’ It’s all about energy; that’s all we are as human beings, we’re energy.”
He may frighten people, but it’s all an act: one he has played to perfection. Over the last decade he’s become Hollywood’s go-to baddie since his turn as Gus Fring, the menacing meth kingpin in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He’s played an aristocratic drug lord in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen; the war criminal Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, hunting for baby Yoda across space; ruthless Stan Edgar in The Boys, wrangling a squad of spoilt superheroes; and corrupt Mayor Cicero in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Next year, he will be Marvel’s newest big bad in Captain America: Brave New World. When we speak, he is in Toronto filming something he can’t tell me anything about, which leaves me racking my brains for a megafranchise he hasn’t been in yet.
