Giancarlo Esposito as Tom Neville in ‘Revolution’
Happily, Giancarlo Esposito doesn’t seem nearly as menacing over breakfast as he has looked on TV the last couple of years.
He’s currently looking ominous as Tom Neville in NBC’s “Revolution,” which launches its second season Wednesday at 10.
Tom was an insurance adjuster before all the world’s power went out. Now he’s a soldier who, Esposito says, has “learned to kill and not feel regret.
“The rules have changed and he has been forced to look at everything differently. What’s the value of human life? Is this a time when it’s all right to ‘lose a few’?”
And if so, what does it say about Tom, who launched the show last year by coldly overseeing the death of a key character?
“One of the questions most fascinating to me,” says Esposito, “is whether Tom is a good guy or a bad guy. I like to think he’s a good guy, but I don’t know for sure.”
No, really, he says. He doesn’t.
“We get scripts about five days ahead,” he says. “It’s a tight schedule. And honestly, I like it that way. If you get a script too far ahead, it can give you too much time to think about it.”
That’s not to suggest Esposito wings it in playing his characters. That’s certainly not the way he approached his last menace, the late Gustavo “Gus” Fring in “Breaking Bad.”
Gus, maybe the most memorable bad guy in a show swarming with creeps, sadists, thugs, sociopaths and psychotics, was last seen walking out of a room where a bomb had gone off.
He seemed to have miraculously survived until he turned his head and the other half of his face wasn’t there. It was a moment no viewer will ever un-see.
“I was four hours in makeup putting that prosthetic on,” Espositio says with a smile. “That was after they made the head cast.
“Then [creator] Vince Gilligan had us shoot the scene 19 times, until the light and the angle were just what he wanted.”
Gus’ two seasons on “Breaking Bad” made him a pop culture touchstone, which isn’t a bad outcome for a role Esposito almost didn’t take.
“I turned them down three times,” he says. “I said I wouldn’t do a guest spot. I wouldn’t do seven episodes out of 13. I wanted to build a character, and I think in the end we did that.”
It’s what he always tries to do.
“You spend years developing this craft,” says Esposito, who turned 55 this year. “When I’m not working, I’m an observer of life. When you are fortunate enough to get the opportunity, you want to get it right.”
He’s had a lot of the right opportunities, including films with Spike Lee and Robert Benton, who he says gave him his best advice ever: “Do everything you’re doing, just take half of it away.”
What he’s learned from all this collectively, he says, is that “I’m a character actor. A journeyman character actor. And that’s exactly what I want to be.”
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