Giancarlo Esposito, Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, is known as an on-screen bad guy, but he told the Tribeca Festival Lisboa earlier today that it’s just an act, “I’m playing a human being, who has all kinds of emotions from A to Z”.
Esposito told a panel on “Villains We Love to Hate” at the Tribeca Festival Lisboa on Thursday. He broke out as the villainous drug kingpin Gustavo Fring on AMC’s Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul.
Then came playing a wealthy drug lord in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, a war criminal in The Mandalorian and menacing Stan Edgar in The Boys. More recently he played the memorably corrupt Mayor Cicero in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.
After all those roles, Hollywood’s in-demand baddie insists villains get a bad rap. “For me, when I’m playing what someone may call a villain, I try to work on the opposite – I try to be as kind as possible, to be as accommodating as possible,” Esposito insisted.
Queen of the South villainess Veronica Falcon agreed bad guys in film and TV deserve better press, even if a villain is by definition evil, as opposed to better-natured Hollywood anti-heroes. “I try to play the characters as humans, as humanly possible,” Falcon explained.
Arguing playing villains is often counter-intuitive, Falcon said bad people in real life don’t go through every day thinking they’re bad people. They may just see themselves doing a job. “So when I’m performing, I try to perform them similarly,” Falcon explained.
Of course, at the same time actors do exhaustive research and preparation to play a villain the way they intend when the cameras roll, with a look of death or inner turmoil, they also have to respect the script they are working off of, and the director running a set.
“The good actors, the good directors, are good collaborators. They collaborate,” Falcon, a veteran stage actor, argued. But much depends on trust.
Esposito recalled working with director Baz Luhrmann on the TV series The Get Down, and having at one point to negotiate on set where his character was to stand. He recounting telling Luhrmann: “I don’t mind being moved around because it’s your vision. But first I need to express my instinct, and we can change it. If I don’t follow my instinct, I won’t have it anymore.”
Esposito also discussed how to leave behind a decidedly bad character, whether at the end of the day on set, or at an airport when fans often call him by his villain’s name rather than his own.
He recounted hosting one of his daughters, then 14 years of age, on the set of Breaking Bad. During her visit, she saw her father filming a scene as Gus Fring did an especially dastardly act in front of the cameras. “That’s Gus. This is papa,” Esposito told his daughter between takes to resolve any conflict in her own mind.
But when the scene ended and the crew and cast got set for the next one, Esposito’s daughter turned in her seat to her father and remarked without a beat: “Good kill, papa.”
Tribeca Festival Lisboa continues through to November 1st.
