Giancarlo Esposito recalls comforting 'intense' fan at convention: 'Woman, look at me'

"She just needed some love,” the "Better Call Saul" actor said.

Giancarlo Esposito may look scary, but he doesn't want you to be scared.

"I could tell she was really an intense human being" Esposito recently told The Guardian about an encounter with one fan at a convention. He overheard other fans joking about a woman who'd become so overwhelmed by his presence she refused to meet his eyes. "It was a big moment in her life to meet me,” he recalled, and she "didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to force her."

Instead of employing the "Look at me. Woman, look at me" approach of his fearsome Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul character Gus Fring, Esposito opted for pure warmth. "She was just really shy and needed a hug,” he said. “So I gave her one! And she put her head right in my chest, and she was on the verge of tears. She just needed some love.”

Esposito burst onto the scene in the late ’80s with a string of roles in celebrated Spike Lee films, including Do the Right Thing and School Daze. Later roles in films like King of New York, The Usual Suspects, and Ali underscored his talents and diverse range of abilities, but Esposito coasted into a career renaissance in the mid-2010s playing a bunch of baddies.

From the ruthless Moff Gideon in Disney+ streaming series The Mandalorian to the unrepentantly ambitious Stan Edgar in Prime Video superhero show The Boys, to his upcoming corrupt mayor in Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, Esposito has mastered the art of villainy.

Related: Breaking Bad vet Giancarlo Esposito on how Miami Vice and yoga shaped Gus

“A guy last weekend said, ‘Wow, you’re not a big man, but you’re so frightening!’" he recalled, adding that "playing very intense characters has helped me to realize how intense I am, and made it okay.”

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Related: Captain America: Brave New World confirms Giancarlo Esposito's mystery role

The price of character actor success often is getting pigeonholed, so Esposito has been expressing his desire to tap back into his range. "I want to play a good guy," he told Jimmy Fallon in 2023. Esposito has been discussed as a possible choice for both Charles Xavier and Magneto in a future X-Men project. "Charles is smart. He's good. But I feel as if there may be some mileage with me and Marvel," he said.

Esposito was all but canonized as a Hollywood–bad guy actor on Sept. 15 when he appeared on the Emmy stage alongside Anthony Starr (The Boys) and Kathy Bates (American Horror Story) in a tribute to small-screen villainy.

He was also recently revealed as the primary antagonist to Anthony Mackie's new Cap in the upcoming Marvel film Captain America: Brave New World. "Can I say it? Wow! I can finally unleash it," he announced to the Comic-Con crowd in July. "I am the King of the Serpent Society. I am Sidewinder!"

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