Giancarlo Esposito

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Movies listed: 53

Born: Unknown

Awards

star on Hollywood Walk of Famestar on Hollywood Walk of Fame

Biography

Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito is an American actor and director whose career spans stage, film, television, animation and video games. Born in Copenhagen on April 26, 1958, to an Italian father and an African American mother, Esposito spent early childhood in Europe before his family settled in New York. He began performing as a child, including a Broadway appearance in the musical Maggie Flynn, and grew up with a background that connected theater, music and screen acting.

Esposito's early career included stage work and screen roles through the 1970s and 1980s. He appeared in films such as Taps and Trading Places before becoming closely associated with Spike Lee's early body of work. In School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo' Better Blues and Malcolm X, Esposito became part of one of the most important American filmmaking collaborations of the late twentieth century. His role as Buggin Out in Do the Right Thing remains one of his signature early performances: comic, political, volatile and memorable within Lee's portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood under pressure.

During the 1990s Esposito built a reputation as a versatile character actor. He appeared in films including King of New York, Bob Roberts, Fresh, Smoke, Blue in the Face, The Usual Suspects and Ali. He also worked steadily on television, most notably as FBI agent Mike Giardello in Homicide: Life on the Street. His roles often drew on an ability to project intelligence, control and simmering tension, qualities that later became central to his most famous television work.