actor; lecturer
Personal Information
Born Giancarlo Giusseppi Alessandro Esposito, c. 1958, in Copenhagen, Denmark; son of an opera singer and a stage technician.
Career
Stage, film, and television actor, 1966--. Stage appearances include Maggie Flynn, The Me Nobody Knows, Lost in the Stars, Seesaw, Miss Moffatt, The American Christmas, Merrily We Roll Along, Don't Get God Started, Zooman and the Sign, Balm in Gilead, The House of Ramon Iglesias, Distant Fires, and The Root, 1966-93. Television series appearances include Miami Vice, Spenser: For Hire, Legwork, and Bakersfield P.D., 1980s-93. Television film appearances include Go Tell It on the Mountain, Roanoak, Simple Justice, and Mood Indigo, 1980s; also appeared in Stolen Moments: Red, Hot + Cool (AIDS documentary), 1994. Film appearances include Taps, 1981; The Cotton Club, 1984; Sweet Lorraine, 1987; School Daze, 1988; Do the Right Thing, 1989; King of New York, 1990; Mo' Better Blues, 1990; Night on Earth, 1991; Bob Roberts, 1992; Malcolm X, 1992; Amos and Andrew, 1993; Fresh, 1994; and Smoke, 1994. Lecturer on college campuses, c. 1988--.
Life's Work
Best known for his role as Buggin' Out, the radical agitator in director Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing, Giancarlo Esposito is a versatile performer with a substantial background in theater, film, and television. Because of his mixed ethnicity--he is half black, half Italian--he once found himself being offered a disproportionate number of "hoodlum" parts, both black and Hispanic. Disgusted at this narrow range of possibilities and disconcerted that some young fans looked up to the drug dealers he portrayed, he began to turn down potentially lucrative roles if he felt they conveyed the wrong message.
To take up the slack, Esposito pursued the college lecture circuit, speaking to audiences of all colors about racism. He has since appeared on the television series Bakersfield P.D. and in such acclaimed films as Bob Roberts, Malcolm X, Night on Earth, and Fresh. Though he most certainly would have earned more money taking the thug roles he passed up, in 1993, he told Us magazine that he has no regrets. "I made less money this year than the previous year," he said. "When I realized that I didn't make any bread but everything's beautiful, I know I'm with the right people and doing the right things."
Esposito described his childhood to Robin Epstein of the Progressive, stating "I was raised in Copenhagen [Denmark] and Germany and Italy for the first years of my life and came [to the United States] when I was three or four years old." Perhaps because his mother, a black opera singer, hailed from Alabama, and his Italian stage-technician father was from Naples, Italy, Esposito was unclear about his ethnic identity, as his mother found out.
"We were in Germany when a delivery man came in," he told Epstein. "He was an African cat, from the Ivory Coast, so he was really dark. My brother and I ran into a closet and started saying 'Schwartzer, schwartzer, schwartzer' [German for black]. We were really afraid of this guy. We thought he was a ghost. My mother looked at him and said, 'I can't believe it. I've got to really talk to my boys because they don't even realize that I'm a different color from their father.' That really frightened her because she knew we were coming to America. I had to learn that I would be discriminated against."
From the time Esposito began his show business career, he encountered the very syndrome that had concerned his mother. At the age of eight he made his stage debut in the musical Maggie Flynn on Broadway, playing a slave child opposite star Shirley Jones. Though he would later question the racial politics of the production, at the time young Giancarlo was thrilled: "I had a solo and everything." Soon Esposito was cast in The Me Nobody Knows, based on the writings of ghetto children, and, in Esposito's words, "a really sad show." He also performed in Lost in the Stars, a musical version of the South Africa-based drama Cry the Beloved Country. At the age of 11 he shared the stage with acting legend Burt Lancaster in The American Christmas.
Growing up in New York City, meanwhile, Esposito experienced feelings of exclusion from both the black and Italian American communities in his neighborhood. His color distanced him from the Italian kids, who, in addition to their racial prejudice, resented his flowing Neapolitan name and his partial command of their ancestors' language. Yet it was precisely his European background and name--and his lack of basketball skills--that put off his black peers. As a result, he told Epstein, "My best friends were Jewish. In that school, they were outcasts too, so that worked out okay." While he never wanted to deny either part of his heritage, Esposito soon found that his skin color would make him the object of frequent abuse and discrimination.
By his early twenties, Esposito had appeared in five Broadway musicals, but he had had little experience in "legitimate" dramatic theater. A turning point came with the Negro Ensemble Company's 1980 production of the Charles Fuller play Zooman and the Sign. "I was pretty shocked when I saw the script," he told the New York Times. "This role is a total opposite of anything in my own life." Portraying a "switchblade-wielding creature who exults in violence," as the Times described him, Esposito won critical raves and, in 1981, Obie and Theater World awards for his performance.
"In the beginning I was frightened about doing Zooman, because I didn't know if I could survive on stage without singing and dancing and being a showman, which I am," Esposito noted in the New York Times. "But I'm not frightened anymore. I've risen to the occasion and am very confident about my future as a dramatic actor." Soon revered producer Harold Prince cast him in another Broadway musical, Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along.
During the 1980s Esposito appeared on television shows like Miami Vice, The Equalizer, and Spencer: For Hire, often playing the role of drug dealer, killer, pimp, or some other kind of thug. His film work, which included Taps and The Cotton Club, offered a little more variety. "Money was always tight," he told Midtown Resident' s Lisa Bornstein. "I never seemed to make enough." He even waited tables on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to supplement his acting income. "I thought I would never be back in a restaurant. People were coming in, what are you doing here? That's not that long ago."
In the late 1980s Esposito became a regular in the films of writer-director Spike Lee, who cast him as fraternity member extraordinaire Big Brother All Mighty in School Daze and as Buggin' Out in Do the Right Thing. The latter performance--full of righteous black anger and some comical doubletalk--made Esposito familiar to a large number of viewers, who often expected him to have the same attitude in real life. Even more troubling was an encounter with two teenage drug dealers who idolized the dealer he had played on Miami Vice; the pair could not understand either the fundamentally make-believe nature of Vice' s pusher or the actor's moral disgust at the character. "I realized that I was a role model for them," he told Epstein in the Progressive.
This stark realization motivated some deep reflection on his part. "I started thinking that I have a responsibility to young people in America not to do this all the time. Not only because my name will become synonymous with those characters, but also because they will be looked up to if I play them well." As a result, Esposito began turning down what he considered shallow criminal parts. "Other black actors tell me I'm crazy," he confessed. "They say, 'If you don't do it, I will.' They don't think that kind of consciousness belongs in show business." For his part, however, he felt at peace with this decision, despite the financial and professional risks.
Esposito soon had a lot more free time on his hands. A colleague recommended lecturing as a way of getting involved in changing attitudes about race while working in front of an audience. Esposito began touring the college circuit, addressing sometimes all-black and sometimes ethnically mixed crowds. Epstein described one such appearance, at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, as "part confession, part sermon, part stump speech, part pop psychology, part stand-up comedy." The actor noted that he was often met by extreme militancy from black students and had to explain that "I regard myself as a human being, as a person. I don't look at everything from a black standpoint. But when I walk out into the world and I'm discriminated against, I immediately understand that I'm a black man."
Esposito continued working for Lee, playing a jazz pianist in Mo' Better Blues and one of the assassins of Malcolm X. In addition, he landed prominent roles in two other 1992 productions, Jim Jarmusch's comedy Night on Earth and Tim Robbins's political "mockumentary" Bob Roberts, in which he portrayed an investigative journalist. Guy Nicolucci of Us called Esposito's performance in the latter "moving, honest, and perfectly seamless." Bob Roberts intensified Esposito's interest in politics, and he soon got involved in Arkansas governor Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. After Clinton's victory, he asserted to Bornstein, "The one thing that's important about putting him in office is holding his foot to the fire," in other words, pressuring him continually to advance an agenda of change and tolerance.
In 1993, Esposito was cast as Sergeant Paul Gigante on the short-lived Fox comedy series Bakersfield P.D. Like Esposito himself, Gigante was part black and part Italian. "I don't think we've seen a guy with this kind of mixed ethnic background on TV before," the actor asserted to Suelain Moy of Entertainment Weekly. He also elected to play another drug dealer--albeit one with greater depth than past roles offered--in the 1994 film Fresh. As the Latin druglord Esteban--who he noted in Venice, "was contemporary, but had old-world values"--he turned in a performance that exhibited "intelligence and care," in the words of New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin. Daily Variety called him "particularly riveting."
Esposito also worked with actor Harvey Keitel in Wayne Wang's film Smoke; the interaction between cast members was reportedly so successful that Wang enlisted them in a side project, a short film with no cuts and no written dialogue. One scene, in fact, required Esposito and Keitel to communicate without speaking at all. In the midst of all his early 1990s film and television work, Esposito nevertheless did not abandon the stage.
In 1993 Esposito appeared off-Broadway in The Root. Once again, he played a drug dealer and petty criminal, but he accepted the role because of the dimension of the character and the seriousness of the play's intent. To Bornstein, Esposito described his character, Willie, as someone "who I would like to think well of." Once again, he had followed his heart, choosing a play in a 150-seat house because of the challenge presented by the material rather than the career advancement or money involved. For his work in Distant Fires at the Atlantic Theater Company, he won a second Obie Award and a Drama Desk nomination.
The next year Esposito made a special appearance in a made-for-television film project entitled Stolen Moments: Red, Hot + Cool. The program contains interviews, live musical performances, and discourse directed toward Hispanics and blacks susceptible to or already infected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and its fatal progression, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The documentary features candid talk on various types of intolerance and prejudice including racism, homophobia, and misogyny, or hatred of women as well as discussing what Vernon Reid described in a special advertising section of Vibe as "the aggressively neglectful policies" of the U.S. government towards the HIV/AIDS community. Esposito was one of many celebrities to lend a hand with Stolen Moments and the goal of raising money for AIDS prevention and research as well as raising consciousness about a social issue often ignored.
Esposito lives in New York City. He moved to the United States, "because, culturally, I think it's really on fire," he told Venice. "I have to be in a place where people do walk, and in neighborhoods that are slightly dangerous."
Awards
Obie and Theater World awards for Zooman and the Sign, 1981; Obie award for Distant Fires, 1993.
Further Reading
Sources
- Daily Variety, February 2, 1994, pp. 4, 18.
- Entertainment Weekly, September 17, 1993, p. 36.
- Midtown Resident, March 19, 1993, p. 13.
- New York Times, December 26, 1980; April 1, 1994.
- Progressive, December 1990, pp. 34-7.
- Us, January 1993, p. 60.
- Venice, August 1994, pp. 19-21.
- Vibe, November 1994, pp. 119-22.
— Simon Glickman
