Few actors have a work schedule as busy as Giancarlo Esposito does. Esposito has earned a beloved star status thanks to his many memorable roles across both film and television. These characters include drug kingpin Gustavo Fring in the Breaking Bad universe, Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, and several supporting roles in Spike Lee joints like Malcolm X and Do The Right Thing. This year alone, his slate is nothing less than impressive, from a new TV role in Guy Richie’s Netflix original series The Gentlemen to making his return as the menacing Stan Edgar in Prime Video’s The Boys. On top of it all, Giancarlo Esposito once again partnered with the AMC network, this time starring in and producing a new series titled Parish, based on the British BBC show The Driver, both created by Danny Brocklehurst.
Kicking off with Ti West‘s MaXXXine, Giancarlo Esposito has also made a triumphant return to the big screen in 2024. He is next set to appear in Francis Ford Coopola’s Megalopolis in September, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. And before 2024 comes to an end, fans can expect to hear him in a voice role for the Russo Brother’s latest feature film, The Electric State. But it doesn’t end there, as Esposito officially joins the Marvel Cinematic Universe next year in Captain America: Brave New World. After years of being fan-casted by MCU fanatics, Esposito will now take on the role of a soon-to-be-revealed mystery villain.
AMC’s Parish is a passion project for Giancarlo Esposito on several levels. Esposito spent the better half of a decade working to bring this show to life, going through multiple creative teams in the process. In addition to starring in the show as the titular character Gracian Parish, Esposito also served as an executive producer while collaborating with the show’s writers to tailor the script and storyline toward his real lived experiences. Audiences follow Gray Parish, a family man and owner of a luxury car service who’s left a life of crime behind him. His sketchy past comes back into the light when Gray’s son is unexpectedly murdered, which is then followed by the collapse of his business. Gray, accompanied by an old friend named Colin Broussard (Skeet Ulrich), returns to his life as a wheelman to make ends meet.
Returning to getaway driving proves difficult for Gray Parish, as he’s quickly caught in the web of a local Zimbabwean gang that deals in human trafficking. Esposito is currently in the middle of trying to get Parish Season 2 off the ground at AMC. As the actor explains in our exclusive interview, a new season of Parish is all that he can ask for because this show has been one of the most challenging yet rewarding projects of his career. Amid a stacked slate, Giancarlo Esposito took some time to sit down with us and discuss Parish, the trajectory of his career, and even his hopes for a Gus Fring spin-off series on AMC.
I wanted to start by asking about your recent trip to the Cannes Film Festival. What was that experience like for you?
I was in Cannes recently for Megalopolis, and that was a great trip. The film was received very well. It was exciting to be standing next to Francis [Ford Coppola], who has such a visionary dream for our world. It’s interesting because French people, and Europeans in general, have such a high regard for film. They really show their love, so it’s nice to feel that expression of gratitude for everyone who works on a film. It was an amazing trip, I was very pleased. I hadn’t seen Megalopolis before, so seeing it with an audience that loves film so much was exciting.
Moving onto Parish, this show is based on a BBC series that came out almost a decade ago. Did the original BBC show influence your performance, or was it something you paid close attention to at all?
This has been an eight-year journey for me. I’m an executive producer, as well as the star of the show. I got the rights after Danny Brocklehurst, who co-created the original show, and his team, along with my manager, tried to get it done out here, and it got into turnaround. My manager gave me a call and said, “Would you be interested in this piece?” So, I looked at the British version, which was three two-hour-long movies, and the writing and the filmmaking took me aback.
I recognize this character as being synonymous with some of the experiences that I’ve had in my own life. I liked him because he was an anti-hero. He was a man looking for the good part of himself and fell into somewhat of a trap while trying to pull his family out of economic destitution. And in doing so, he winds up in a bigger conundrum. I recognized the traits of this character as relating to the part of my life when I was bankrupt and lost my house. I felt like I lost the respect of my family because I couldn’t provide and had to rebuild everything. The story was a little bit different than my own, but there were certainly similarities.
I think we went through eight different versions of this story. Eventually, I realized that it would be beneficial, in terms of my passion and relationship with the character, to change the setting from England to New Orleans and then imbibe him with some of the challenges I faced to make it more dynamic.
What was the most uniquely challenging thing about playing this particular character?
The challenging part was to balance someone who is not a bad human being but has the ability to do bad things. And so, we were able to contextualize Gracian with a past life that he was hiding from his family. That coupled with the loss of a son — I can’t imagine losing one of my children. That puts him in a space where he becomes a desperate man. Thus, it becomes a story about a desperate man who is good but is also willing to do some things that are unsavory to be able to survive.
Then, you have a situation with both action and excitement — an emotional throughline that you can capitalize on. I also wanted to tell the story of the everyman, which is not often told. We always tell stories of heroes and villains, but when do we tell the story of someone who just can’t make ends meet and wants to have an honest existence yet feels unable to do so because of how the world is? Parish is a story of survival, desperation, and loss.
In terms of when you’re choosing roles nowadays, do you feel like it’s a conscious decision to be going for these gritty characters? Is that something you actively seek out?
Not necessarily. I look at the whole project and all of the material to determine my choice. I do like characters that are stacked with complications because I think that makes it interesting for the audience to watch. As an actor, I enjoy being able to display some vulnerability, even with someone like Gracian Parish. I don’t want to play someone who’s just evil and always wins, I like characters who are complicated. This one is more complicated than any other character I’ve played because he’s the man who has hidden something from his family and left a previous life behind. He was good at what he did; he was a getaway man.
Gracian Parish is so important to me because he’s not just a one-note character with the experience of being a kingpin and being able to get out of anything. He used to be that, but he no longer is. So, in navigating the situation he’s in right now, Gracian has to call upon some skills to allow him and his family to survive. I love stories that are centered around complicated families because, in my experience, I had to deal with bankruptcy, losing my house, getting a divorce, and being distant from my children. It was all too much to shoulder, and I just wanted to bail on all of it. However, instead of doing that, I decided to stay in the mix and keep a relationship with my former wife and my children… and find them something new that would be more honest, truthful, and organic.
I would also love to discuss Netflix’s The Gentleman, which was released earlier this year. Do you have any favorite memories from your time working with Guy Ritchie?
It’s a very different experience working with Guy Richie. I wanted to work with him because I love his movies, and [The Gentlemen] is a return to what he does best: nailing that very cheeky, dark comedy that embraces action and violence but is also a story about family. We were sat outside a beautiful Gentleman’s Club in downtown London, and I was called into Guy’s trailer after learning an almost two-page monologue on Churchill that I was to deliver that morning. I sat with him and had a conversation, much like this, about the world, humanity, and people. I thought it was just an introductory conversation before I was to go in and do my thing, but then he said to me, “Do you think that we’ve missed anything?”
Guy’s strength is understanding the juxtaposition between aristocracy and criminality, and I wanted my character to be very different, which he had already outlined. We talked for another thirty minutes while one of the writers, Matthew Read, was typing. At the time I didn’t know who Matt was, and he started typing all of our conversation and recited it back to us. Suddenly, we had a new scene with new lines, and Guy looked up at the cinematographer who was coming to the door and asked how long we had. When he said ten minutes, Guy looked over to me and asked, “Do you think you can do it?” Someone was literally pumping out the pages from a printer at the back of the trailer, and I said, “Yeah, why not?”
I walked out of the trailer and into the Gentleman’s Club, where my dressing room was in the basement, and read the new scene over and over again. Ten minutes later, I was shooting, which really taught me that film is malleable. Guy is my kind of filmmaker, he never stops working and never stops making it better.
Parish is an AMC Original Series, and when I spoke with you last year, you briefly mentioned a desire for a Gus Fring prequel. Is that something you are hoping to pursue at AMC?
AMC have been champions for Parish, and they were certainly champions for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, so I would consider that most certainly. I don’t have the power to greenlight a Gus Fring prequel, but I think that character deserves a little attention in that arena. Maybe I say that now because I’m confident that I could be at that number one spot and bring in viewers for an interesting story. It wouldn’t be anything without Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, who was the showrunner on Better Call Saul. Have I mentioned it to Peter? I certainly have, but he wants to play in a different universe right now. Who knows what the future may hold, though? I feel like I’ve always wanted to tell Gus Fring’s backstory because I think we all want to know more about his complicated nature and how he came to be.
However, Vince reminded me on Better Call Saul that it’s what we don’t know that keeps drawing us back. Vince always credits me with creating Gus, and he’s told me that I created a whole world that only existed in Gus’ eyes. Now, I want to be able to have that world exposed so that you can see more of who I am as a human being. You started to see it in Better Call Saul even more than in Breaking Bad because you got a stronger sense of who Gus truly was, how lonely he was, and how he fought to become who he is since childhood. All of those things as an actor, I would love to explore, but it’s out of my control. Would I return with this combination? Of course I would!
AMC have stuck by me with Parish, and it’s not only the millions of dollars they put into each episode — it’s also their mental trust. It’s also their notes. It’s also their collaboration and suggestions. They haven’t had a show that resembles Parish on their network as of yet, so I’m very proud of it. I pray that we will be able to go forward with this particular show because this character gives me the opportunity to play many more colors than anything you’ve seen before. It’s not so much just to be number one on the call sheet and to be a producer. This was one of the hardest shows I’ve ever done. I’ve been doing this for close to 56 years, but this project was the hardest thing I’ve ever done because I was responsible for more than just myself.
Finally, just to touch upon your role in Ti West’s MaXXXine, what are some of the biggest differences between shooting a television show and a film for you? Also, what are you hoping audiences will take away from the final chapter in the X Trilogy?
I love television, especially when I have a hand in and a leg up on the material, and I’m passionate about the connection between the character and the writing. This affected me deeply on Parish because I wanted a lot of my life to be in the script since it resembled what I saw the everyman going through in everyday life. Film is an extension of television in that way, but it’s a hot medium so everything is larger. I love film and have been dying to return to it. The string of recent movies that I’ve done, Megalopolis, MaXXXine, and The Electric State, all exemplify my passion for film.
In a way, it is a more compressed version because you’re telling a story in only two hours, so you have to be even more specific about the points you want to make and more creative about how everything fits together in those spaces. MaXXXine was a wonderful journey for me because I believe in young and dynamic directors, and Ti West is really that. He has very original ideas. I’ve been very fascinated with Mia Goth as well, and MaXXXine was a blessing for me to be a part of in the way that I was. Originally, Ti had talked to me about playing a different role, which was a bigger role and a good one at that. But it didn’t give me the connection that I was looking for with the main throughline of the story, which is how do you make it in Hollywood?
I had agreed to just let it go and work with Ti on something else, but then he came back to me with the role that I finally chose. It’s a role that is connected to Mia, and it’s a role that believes in her, so it links up with a passion for me. I teach acting workshops, and I want to uplift people and bring them to their best selves. It sounds kind of corny maybe, but it really is what I’m about. I like to inspire. So, this role connected with me telling this woman over and over again, “You’re going to make it!” He supports her in every way possible because he believes in her. Isn’t that part of what the world needs right now?
All episodes of Parish are now streaming on AMC+!
Premiere Date: March 31, 2024.
Created by Danny Brocklehurst.
Based on The Driver by Danny Brocklehurst & Jim Poyser.
Developed by Danny Brocklehurst & Sunu Gonera.
Executive Producers: Eduardo Javier Canto, Ryan Maldonado, Giancarlo Esposito, Theo Travers, Barry Jossen, Tana Jamieson, Josh Kesselman, Danny Sherman, Danny Brocklehurst, David Morrissey, Nicola Shindler, Jim Poyser, & Jolyon Symonds.
Main Cast: Giancarlo Esposito, Zackary Momoh, Paula Malcomson, Skeet Ulrich, Ivan Mbakop, Bonnie Mbuli, Arica Himmel, Dax Rey, Amanda Brugel, Caleb Baumann, Currie Graham, Sam Malone, & Bradley Whitford.
Composer: JimiJame$ & Wow Jones.
Production Companies: Thruline Entertainment, A+E Studios, & AMC Studios.
Episode Count: 6 (Season 1).
