Giancarlo Esposito Keeps Breaking Bad — When Will Emmy Voters Notice?
The 6-time nominee on menacing ‘The Boys’ and filling Andre Braugher’s shoes. Plus: The animated feature Oscar race goes uber-auteur
Don’t be fooled by the deceptive quiet of these final days of August. Emmy ballots are due on Wednesday, which means I’ve got time for one last newsletter interview with a nominee — the great Giancarlo Esposito, with you in a moment — as well as a podcast conversation coming up tomorrow with The Studio masterminds and nominees Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. In the midst of all of this, I’m fielding what feels like 100 e-mails a minute to book our TIFF interview studio (see you there!) as well as my own movie-watching schedule. Every year, it’s about this point where I wonder how anyone makes the time to watch actual films at the film festival. If you have any tips, email me: katey@theankler.com.
But hey, it’s not a bad problem to have, particularly since we’re in the final few days before I find out if my Fall Festival Draft is going to go completely awry. If you’re feeling the excitement as well, make sure to become a Prestige Junkie After Party subscriber and join me and Christopher Rosen for our first-ever live call-in show this Friday at 9 a.m. PT. Chris will be at Telluride and will give a sense of the buzz on the ground, and we’ll answer all of your questions about fall movie season, Emmy winners and anything else on your mind.
Now let’s hand the newsletter over to The Boys’ Esposito — and then stick around for some of my thoughts on the surprising arthouse power players in this year’s best animated feature Oscar race.
‘Sometimes I Feel a Little Schizophrenic’
“It seems like the creators of many different shows have me say a lot.” That’s a pretty major understatement for Giancarlo Esposito, whose unforgettable voice and screen presence have made him one of the most ubiquitous actors working today. This year alone, the 67-year-old has appeared on shows like Poker Face and The Residence in addition to the films The Electric State and Captain America: Brave New World. He also earned an Emmy nomination for his guest turn on Prime Video’s wildly popular series The Boys, the sixth nod in Esposito’s career.
“I’ve realized that the key to my success personally as an actor — not financially or how many roles I’ve played, but the key to my fulfillment — was to be able to not be tied up and do the same character for five or six years,” he tells me in a Zoom conversation last week from Los Angeles, where he’s currently filming another season of Guy Ritchie’s series The Gentlemen. After playing all these different roles and jumping from set to set, he continues, “I feel like my personality has become more well-rounded. Sometimes, as I tell my kids, I feel a little schizophrenic. But most of the time I feel like it’s interesting.”
On the ultraviolent superhero series The Boys, Esposito plays what might be the closest to what we think of as a “Giancarlo Esposito-type” — someone who is quiet and powerful and becomes more menacing the calmer he acts. That certainly describes Gus Fring, the villain he played on Breaking Bad and again on Better Call Saul, and the role that made him eternal TV royalty. Yet somehow, he’s never won an Emmy, not for playing Gus Fring (three nominations across the two shows) nor for his role as The Mandalorian villain Moff Gideon (two nominations). Maybe this time, in a category where he’s up against some prime competition — including The Pitt’s Shawn Hatosy, The White Lotus’ Scott Glenn, Andor’s Forest Whitaker and The Last of Us guest stars Jeffrey Wright and Joe Pantoliano — things will be different.
Esposito is, after all, the only actor nominated this year for The Boys, for an episode that aired over a year ago (overall, the series received four nominations). Though his titan of industry baddie, Stan Edgar, was a key antagonist in earlier seasons of the satirical superhero series, in season 4, he appeared in just a single episode, “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son.” It’s a rich platform for Esposito’s acting skills, as Stan manages to intimidate anyone he interacts with and escapes from prison by the end of the episode.
Making that episode was a challenge, Esposito tells me. It was filmed in the middle of the Canadian winter, and he had to shoot a scene running through the snow while wearing Ferragamos. (“I’m a runner, I’m in such great shape, and everyone is being so ginger with me, and I’m like, ‘Get me some fucking snow shoes!’” he says.) Still, it was the scenes in the middle of the episode, where he was interacting with several major and minor characters all at once, that proved equally demanding. “It’s not one of my favorite things to be in a scene with 10 motherfuckers,” he tells me with a laugh. “I mean, it’s a lot of different looks, a lot of angles. It takes a lot of time.”
The magic of The Boys, though, is what can emerge from so many characters and so many different tones jammed into a single series. “I look back at this episode and I realize that everyone has a different agenda,” he says. “Everyone’s tone is different, you got flying sheep and animals, it’s all this stuff. And yet it plays beautifully.”
Any conversation with Esposito inevitably leads back to his collaborators and friends, and he’s collected many across his four-decade career. I mentioned that I’d seen him at the Brooklyn premiere of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest earlier this month. Lee cast the New York-raised Esposito in both School Daze and Do the Right Thing (as the memorable supporting character Buggin’ Out), two of the actor’s earliest breakout roles. As it turns out, the actor’s attendance at the premiere wasn’t just a social visit — Esposito’s daughter Ruby worked in the camera department on Lee’s film. “Spike asked me to do Highest 2 Lowest, but my schedule wouldn’t allow it,” Esposito tells me. “It didn’t work for me, but it worked for her.”
And then there’s Andre Braugher, whom Esposito replaced on Netflix’s The Residence after Braugher’s sudden death in December 2023. The role — the formidable chief usher at the White House whose murder sparks the entire plot — couldn’t be filled by just anyone. And yet, “It was a difficult decision for me to make until I freed myself up,” Esposito tells me. “People ask, what would Jesus do? I said, well, what would Andre do? It was literally that simple.”
For the most part, he didn’t watch the scenes that Braugher had already completed, save for one moment when Esposito had to review playback to pose in a doorway exactly the way his friend had. In that moment, he tells me with visible emotion, “That really got me. I had said to myself, I’m doing this to honor a great artist, a great man, a great story, and myself. It’s a continuation of what we do as creative artists — most of the time, it’s to try to honor the story and to allow people to feel something from it. And if we can continue to do that, then we’re true.”
The Year Animated Movies Went Arthouse
As everyone in my life with young kids already knows, this weekend brought one of the unlikeliest theatrical release sensations of the summer, with KPop Demon Hunters earning potentially $20 million from just two nights in theaters. Already a global smash on Netflix — it will soon become the platform’s biggest original movie ever; take that Red Notice — the theatrical release nearly two months after KPop Demon Hunters premiered is a sign of just how huge the movie is, and that Netflix might even be willing to admit there’s value in theatrical release. (Ha ha, all right, maybe not.)
As unlikely as it seemed when I first wrote about it earlier this summer, KPop Demon Hunters now feels like a strong contender to win not only the best original song Oscar for megahit “Golden” but also best animated feature. Even if Zootopia 2 opens huge at Thanksgiving, it’s still a sequel — and the only traditional sequels to ever win in the animated feature category are Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4. (Good news, perhaps, for Toy Story 5, coming next year.) It’s also hard to imagine Zootopia 2 ever matching KPop’s sheer cultural saturation. On the other hand, the animated feature race has been leaning more arthouse lately, with Flow besting The Wild Robot last year and Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron toppling Elemental and the second Spider-Verse film the year before that.
So even though A24’s English-dubbed release of Chinese blockbuster Ne Zha 2, an epic fantasy about a young boy with immense powers who fights for immortality, didn’t make too many waves at the box office this past weekend, I’m keeping an eye on it in the Oscar race. The A24 imprimatur allows Academy voters to see it as more of an auteurist effort than a four-quadrant blockbuster — having seen it, I’d argue it’s a little bit of both. And with Sinners, Weapons, Wicked: For Good and a third Avatar all teeing up to be significant Oscar players, Ne Zha 2 could fit the spirit of a year that’s loaded with ambitious, artful blockbusters.
Of course, A24 is not the only indie studio with an animated project in the race. Neon is backing the English-dubbed release of the French animated feature ARCO — about a young boy living in far into the future who time-travels to 2075 and tries to make it back home — with no less than Natalie Portman attached as a producer. She’ll be in Toronto with director Ugo Bienvenu to promote the North American release in November, with Will Ferrell, America Ferrera and Andy Samberg now part of the voice cast. Neon nabbed a surprise animated feature nomination a few years ago for another French film, Robot Dreams. Could they pull it off again?
It’s an ideal year to test out just how arty the animated category can be. Though Pixar will mount a campaign for the summer box office dud Elio, the studio is undeniably less potent than it was five years ago: After winning the Oscar 11 times in the first 19 years of the animated feature category, Pixar hasn’t won since 2020’s Soul. DreamWorks Animation is light on contenders, too, beyond January’s Dog Man and this summer’s The Bad Guys 2 (which was well-received by the original’s fans, but also faces the same sequel problem as Zootopia 2 — albeit without the benefit of the original film having been recognized by the Academy). There’s a power vacuum here to be filled. Game on!
