Age: 68
male
Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito (born April 26, 1958) is an American actor. He is known for portraying Gus Fring in the AMC crime drama series Breaking Bad from 2009 to 2011 and its prequel series Better Call Saul from 2017 to 2022. He won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series twice for this role. He earned three nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. His other television roles include federal agent Mike Giardello in the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street (1998–1999), Sidney Glass / Magic Mirror in the ABC fantasy series Once Upon a Time (2011–2017), Tom Neville in the NBC series Revolution (2012–2014), Dr. Edward Ruskins in the Netflix series Dear White People (2017–2021), Stan Edgar in the Amazon series The Boys (2019–present) and The Boys Presents: Diabolical (2022), and Moff Gideon in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian (2019–2023), the lattermost of which earned him two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He also portrayed Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the MGM+ series Godfather of Harlem (2019–present), acted in the HBO drama series Westworld (2016), and starred in the Netflix television series Kaleidoscope (2023), The Gentlemen (2024), and The Residence (2025). He is also known for his collaboration with Spike Lee, acting in several of his films, such as School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo' Better Blues (1990), and Malcolm X (1992). His other major films include Taps (1981), King of New York (1990), Bob Roberts (1992), Fresh (1994), The Usual Suspects (1995), Ali (2001), Monkeybone (2001), Last Holiday (2006), Rabbit Hole (2010), Okja (2017), Megalopolis (2024), MaXXXine (2024), and Captain America: Brave New World (2025). He voiced Akela in the live-action remake of The Jungle Book (2016). Description above from the Wikipedia article Giancarlo Esposito, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
If Anaïs Mitchell's folk musical had instead begun as a movie musical in the late 90s---primarily because I kept coming back to Andráe Crouch as Yertle the Turtle when I thought of Hades--where Orpheus and Eurydice came of age in the Harlem Renaissance. I imagine the world of the living as a vibrant, thriving underground jazz club in Harlem, where a musician like Orpheus could be looking for a break, with Eurydice being more from a Hooverville, suffering from the turmoil of The Great Depression and hoping to find kinder, more generous souls among the creatives. I see Perspeohone running a gorgeous Art Deco speakeasy in both worlds, and Hadestown reflecting the Rust Belt future of automobile cities. Everything in Hadestown looks like Depression-era Detroit, but with 50 years' coating of coal dust and crude oil. (Everything outside of Hades's plush, old men's club vibe office, that is.) His office is located skybox style over Hadestown, where he often watches the workers as a factory manager might, from behind a clean, safe wall of windows.
