(If you haven't watched Breaking Bad, there are spoilers.)
The first time I saw Giancarlo Esposito, I didn't like him. It was on Homicide: Life On the Streets, and he represented the New Guard to me. The show had changed; it had become slicker. They had women detectives, but none were as tough as Melissa Leo, and no one, I thought, could fill the shoes of Andre Braugher. Giancarlo came in and I didn't give him much of a chance.
But I loved him immediately on Breaking Bad. I loved him because he was so quiet, because he seemed to see so much and chose his words so carefully. I loved that he was a businessman, a man known as a civic person, a man who seemed to be able to assess people and situations so well. As time went on, we saw more of his ruthless nature, that beyond the quiet, there was a part that would exact revenge, that went to the bottom line pitilessly and cut ties and took the lives of people who had become liabilities.
In this series Esposito developed someone so memorable, so evil, so meticulous, someone who seemed invincible, but ended up being only human. Someone who was both so quiet and so flamboyant, who, when he died, walked out of a room, and I thought, "Can nothing kill this man?" and then there was the reveal, the Grand Guignol face, so operatic, so disrespectful, a death that hearkened horribly back to the title of the episode, "Face Off," a death of a character that demanded the name of the final episode, because that was how important this character was to this series.
In this season, we saw his brutality, his willingness to slit someone's throat to make a public declaration, his tragedy, how he witnessed the murder of his partner beside him at a business meeting, his power, haivng his own private clinic, doctors and nurses, and stocks of blood for himself and his associates, and always to the end, the care he took with himself in his actions to present himself in a certain way. I will never forget Gus. I can't wait to see what Giancarlo Esposito does next.
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