Birth name: Giancarlo Giusseppi Alessandro Esposito
Date of birth
26 April 1958
Location of Birth: Copenhagen, Denmark
Spouse
Joy McManigal (1995 - present) 4 children
He is half African-American, half Italian. His mother was an opera singer, and his father was a stagehand/carpenter from Naples, Italy.
His mother was doing a nightclub gig on a split bill with Josephine Baker in Copenhagen around the time he was born.
Lived in Europe, New York City and Cleveland until he, his older brother and their parents relocated and permanently settled down in Manhattan when Giancarlo was six.
Two children, with McManigal, Shayne (b. 1997) and Kate (b. 1998)
Is a member of the Atlantic Theater Ensemble. Atlantic Theater is the theater company started by David Mamet and William H. Macy.
He has won two Obie Awards for his performances in Distant Fires and Zooman and the Sign.
Trivia
Two children, with McManigal, Shayne (b. 1997) and Kate (b. 1998) (show more)
Actor - filmography
"South Beach" (2006) TV Series (filming) .... Fuentes
Last Holiday (2005) (post-production)
Derailed (2005/I) (completed) .... Detective Church
Carlito's Way: Rise to Power (2005) (completed) .... Little Jeff
Some Kind of Heaven (2005) (completed) .... Officer Hernandez
Chupacabra: Dark Seas (2005) (TV) .... Dr. Peña
Hate Crime (2005) .... Detective Esposito
Back in the Day (2005/I) .... Benson Cooper, Reggie's Dad
I Will Avenge You, Iago! (2005) .... Director
Doing Hard Time (2004) (V) .... Capt. Pierce
5ive Days to Midnight (2004) (TV) .... Tim Sanders
A Killer Within (2004) .... Vargas
Noise (2004/I) .... Hank
NYPD 2069 (2004) (TV)
Blind Horizon (2003) .... JC Reynolds
Ash Tuesday (2003) .... Karl
"Girls Club" (2002) TV Series .... Nicholas Hahn (2002)
Ali (2001) .... Cassius Clay, Sr.
Piñero (2001) .... Miguel Algarin
Monkeybone (2001) .... Hypnos
"The $treet" (2000) TV Series .... Tom Divack
Homicide: The Movie (2000) (TV) .... Officer Mike Giardello
Josephine (2000/I) .... Spike
Big City Blues (1999/I) .... Georgie
"Homicide: Life on the Street" (1993) TV Series .... Special Agent Mike Giardello (1998-1999)
... aka Homicide (USA: informal short title)
Thirst (1998) (TV) .... Dr. Lawrence Carver
Naked City: Justice with a Bullet (1998) (TV) .... Chaz Villanueva
Where's Marlowe? (1998) .... Blind Man
Lulu on the Bridge (1998) (uncredited) .... Black (DVD deleted scene)
Phoenix (1998) .... Louie
Creature (1998) (TV) .... Lt. Thomas Peniston/Werewolf
... aka Peter Benchley's Creature
Twilight (1998) .... Reuben Escobar
Stardust (1998) .... Mr. Peavey
Trouble on the Corner (1997) .... Darryl
Five Desperate Hours (1997) (TV) .... Joseph Grange
Nothing to Lose (1997) .... Charlie Dunt
The Maze (1997/I) .... Henry Kunitz
The People (1997) .... Anthony Rivera
California (1996) .... Rich Man\Pimp
Loose Women (1996) .... Stylist #2
The Tomorrow Man (1996) (TV) .... Jonathan Driscoll
Waiting to Exhale (1995) (uncredited) .... David Matthews
Blue in the Face (1995) .... Tommy Finelli
... aka Brooklyn Boogie (UK)
The Keeper (1995) .... Paul Lamont
Reckless (1995/I) .... Fast Tim Timko
Smoke (1995) .... 1st OTB Man Tommy
... aka Smoke - Raucher unter sich (Germany)
The Usual Suspects (1995) .... Jack Baer, FBI
... aka Üblichen Verdächtigen, Die (Germany)
Kla$h (1995) .... Stoney
... aka Klash (USA)
Benders (1994) .... Jack
Fresh (1994) .... Esteban
"Bakersfield, P.D." (1993) TV Series .... Detective Paul Gigante
Amos & Andrew (1993) .... Reverend Fenton Brunch
Simple Justice (1993) (TV) .... Dr. Kenneth Clark
Relentless: Mind of a Killer (1993) (TV) .... Arthur Sistrunk
Malcolm X (1992) .... Thomas Hayer
... aka X (USA: poster title)
Bob Roberts (1992) .... Bugs Raplin
Night on Earth (1991) .... YoYo
... aka Une nuit sur terre (France)
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991) .... Jimmy Jiles
Mo' Better Blues (1990) .... Left Hand Lacey (Piano)
King of New York (1990) .... Lance
Do the Right Thing (1989) .... Buggin Out
School Daze (1988) .... Julian
Sweet Lorraine (1987) .... Howie
Heartbeat (1987) (V) .... Gang Member #1
Maximum Overdrive (1986) .... Videoplayer
Roanoak (1986) (TV) .... Simon Fernandes
Rockabye (1986) (TV) .... Marcus
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) .... Street Vendor
Finnegan Begin Again (1985) (TV) .... Intruder
Go Tell It On the Mountain (1985) (TV) .... Elisha
The Cotton Club (1984) .... Bumpy Hood
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1983) .... Julio
... aka Enormous Changes
... aka Trumps
Trading Places (1983) .... Cellmate #2
Taps (1981) .... J.C. Pierce
... aka The Siege at Bunker Hill: T.A.P.S (UK: TV title)
The Gentleman Bandit (1981) (TV) .... Jamie
... aka The Bandit Priest
Posted: Thu 07 Aug 2008 03:34 Post subject: Giancarlo Guiseppe Alessandro Esposito
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From: Dominic Candeloro <D>
List Editor: Dominic Candeloro <D>
Editor's Subject: Giancarlo GA Esposito article by John Gennari full text
Author's Subject: Giancarlo GA Esposito article by John Gennari full text
Date Written: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 20:56:49 -0500
Date Posted: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 20:56:49 -0500
Giancarlo Guiseppe Alessandro Esposito
John Gennari
[manuscript of essay published in COMMON QUEST , vol. 4, no. 2 (Winter 2000):
8-17]
"Giardello, what kind of name is that?" The desperate, gun-toting white man
puzzles over the dark features of the FBI agent trying to talk him into
releasing the son and daughter he holds hostage in his barricaded apartment.
The vowel-heavy name doesn't square with the face: he needs identity
clarification. "I'm Italian, Italian and black," Mike Giardello responds. A
smile creeps up on the face of the embattled white man, and he seizes the
opportunity to crack wise at this racial enigma. "Ha," he says, "chitlin'
scallopini."
For Giancarlo Esposito, the actor who played Mike Giardello on the acclaimed
NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Streets, the confusions of a biracial
identity have been personal adventure and professional calling card. Son of an
African American mother from Alabama and an Italian father from Naples, now
husband of an Irish American woman and father of two mixed-race girls, Esposito
is a walking, breathing embodiment of U.S. cultural complexity. Since
establishing his career playing straight-up black characters in Spike Lee's
early movies, Esposito has gravitated to roles as offbeat, idiosyncratic
African
Americans whose hybrid backgrounds and complex personalities scramble
conventional racial expectations. An actor whose keen mind and taut body
vibrate with intensity, Esposito now reigns as one of the most intriguing
border-crossing figures in American film and television.
In Homicide, Esposito's inscrutably-pedigreed Mike Giardello is the prodigal
son of Lieutenant Al Giardello (Yapho Kotto), known affectionately as "Gee," an
Afro-Sicilian American who runs the detective squad like a padrone, wise in the
ways of power, fiercely protective of his surrogate family. In the 1994 movie
Fresh, Esposito took his own turn as a paragon of Old World manhood -- in a
more
darkly sinister form -- as the Latino drug lord Esteban. In The Keeper (1995),
he plays Paul Lamont, a New York City jail guard whose repressed memories of a
troubled relationship with his Haitian father leak out as he becomes deeply
implicated in the fate of a Haitian immigrant convict. As Yo-Yo in Jim
Jarmush's Night on Earth (1991), Esposito's jive-talking Brooklyn b-boy
undergoes an hilarious and magical bonding with an incompetent East German
immigrant cab driver. In Paul Auster and Wayne Wang's Blue in the Face (1995),
Esposito's virtuoso improvisational sketch of black Italian Tommy Finelli
epitomizes indie film hipness.
On-screen mastery of such trans-ethnic experience comes hard by life
experience. Esposito's parents met in Italy in the 1950s when his mother, an
opera singer, was performing at La Scala in Milan, where his father worked as a
stage technician. Esposito lived his first five years in Naples, Rome, and
Hamburg in tow to his mother's career. He was born in 1958 in Copenhagen,
where
she split a nightclub bill with Josephine Baker. The family later moved to
Elmsford, New York, just north of New York City, where Esposito lived on the
border between the town's black and Italian neighborhoods.
It’s often said that the Irish and Italians gained their passports as
full-fledged white Americans when they adopted American racism. For Esposito,
the same dynamic was at work, only in reverse: the move from Italy to the
United
States made him “black.” "In Italy," he told me in an interview in June 1999,
"I was raised in a household where I never realized my mother was black or my
father was white. Once I came to America, things changed."
That moment of realization at age six came, oddly enough, in the men’s room of
the old Horn and Hardart Automat on 57th Street. “My brother and I went to the
bathroom alone without my dad. The urinals, to me they were like incredible
things: they were like sculpture, these big porcelain urinals. I liked to go
right down the row and hit them all and make a big wall of waterfalls. My dad
let us go, but we didn't know he had followed us. Then I went to go to the
bathroom, using the last urinal. A very tall white man walked in. There were
plenty of urinals, but he walks over and shoves me out of the way -- all of a
sudden I'm peeing on the floor. I didn't know what the hell was going on. My
dad was standing in the doorway and saw it. He went at this guy and beat the
crap out of him."
A white man walks past another white man on the way in to a public bathroom,
can't imagine he's the father of the black kid using the urinal, and assumes by
some tacit racial agreement that he can shove the kid with impunity. The
enraged father -- enraged both by the assault on his son and, surely also, by
the evident invisibility of his fatherhood -- reacts with violence: so
transpired the lifting of an immigrant family's veil of racial innocence. "It
was one of the most frightening memories I ever had," Esposito says, "and when
I
understood that it was all about the fact I was the wrong color, it freaked me
out. I said, where are we?"
The great Brooklyn Dodger's catcher Roy Campanella ("little bell" in Italian),
whose Sicilian father sold vegetables in the Nicetown neighborhood of
Philadelphia, is remembered not for his childhood scraps with the black and
white kids who called him "halfbreed," nor for his years playing winter ball in
Mexico and Puerto Rico where he was able to pass as a native, but as
one of a handful of black players who broke the color line in major league
baseball in the late 1940s. Giancarlo Esposito is similarly a black man: not
because of his love of jazz or his commitment to black progress, but because
that’s how Americans go about labeling people of “mixed race.”
Much as he would prefer not to have to choose between his African American
and
Italian bloodlines, experience tells him that in America this choice usually
will be made for him. Cab drivers, in particular, have made a habit of
defining
him prima facie by a skin tone several shades darker than his father's deep
olive, leaving him curbside with his hand hanging aloft. Esposito’s romance in
the late 1980s with white actress Fia Porter hit a snag when Porter's parents
in
Nashville threatened to disown her for dating a black man. Esposito was
married
in 1996 to producer Joy McManigal. The couple have no illusions that their two
mixed-race toddler girls will grow up in a color-blind society. Just the day
before I interviewed Giancarlo, he was with his wife and daughters Shane and
Kale in the waiting room of a pediatrician's office, when a woman who had been
staring intently at the family approached him. "They didn't get much color, did
they?" she said.
Esposito can regale you with stories of not fitting in. Back in Elmsford, "the
black guys didn't understand me. They didn't understand how I spoke. I didn't
walk with a little dip. I didn't wear my hair in an Afro and I had a name like
Giancarlo Giuseppe Allesandro Esposito. They couldn't relate. Same with those
little guinea guys who I so wanted to relate to because of my boyhood with my
dad in Italy. I had to wind up telling them, listen, I'm more Italian than you
are. Look at my name. I lived there. It worked out by the end of my years in
Elmsford that I sang My Way at my high school commencement. It made everybody
happy."
Esposito found refuge in a friendship with another ethnic outsider named Paul
Budish, now a cop in Miami. “His saving grace in high school,” says Esposito,
“
was that he was funny, in a very personalized Jewish way. No one messed with
him because he had the gift of lightness. He used to say to me 'mal, mal, mal'
[bad, bad, bad in Italian]. Why am I bad? Because I didn't fit in. He didn't
fit in either. It was a big joke between us. We went through school together.
He made me feel comfortable. We didn't commiserate over the fact that we were
both outcasts. It was just known. We never even had to talk about it."
Budish was the only of Esposito's childhood friends who invited him home to
meet his parents. "He walks in the front door and he calls up to Sam and
Charlotte -- he didn't call them mom and pop, it was Sam and Charlotte --
'don't
be afraid of the black guy with me.' That's how we entered the front door.
Charlotte came down and I just fell in love with her right away. She starts
feeding me gefilte fish. 'You know what this is?' she asked me. Yeah, I kind
of did know, because my mother was into Jewish culture. These people were like
my family, my second home. No problem with my color."
An unabashed liberal integrationist, Esposito waxes passionate about Jewish
participation in the civil rights movement. "I just don't get it," he says
about recent tensions between blacks and Jews. “Jews more than anyone else
were
with African Americans when we were trying to find ourselves, and they still do
things that help create unity between their culture and black culture."
Esposito and his wife have enrolled their three-year-old daughter Shane in a
Jewish nursery school. "I want her to know Jewish people," he says. "I want
her to know about that culture. I want her to hear a cantor sing.”
If Esposito is black, by choice and by fate, and maybe a little Jewish, by a
leap of appreciation, don’t think the Italian part doesn’t get respect. It's
not lost on Esposito that Italian Americans, as a group, not only did not
distinguish themselves as supporters of the civil rights movement, but were at
the forefront of the 1970s and 1980s white ethnic backlash against affirmative
action and other racial justice initiatives of post-1960s liberalism. He's
acutely aware that his difficulty making friends with the Italian kids in
Elmsford had much to do with the negative stereotypes of blacks they heard in
their homes. The irony is that many of these kids's grandparents were
Sicilians
and southern Italians who themselves were subject to the same racial ridicule,
both in Italy and America. They were "othered," first by lighter-complected
northern Italians and northern Europeans, then by Anglo Americans, as lazy,
criminally inclined, intellectually inferior, and overly sensual. And then,
when they gained an economic foothold in the United States and secured their
status as "white" Americans, they turned the same stereotypes back on the
people
poorer and darker than themselves.
Of course, this thumbnail sketch of Italian American racism is also a
stereotype. It doesn't account for any individual's particular experience;
worse, it doesn't explain why Italians and African Americans have shared so
much
mutually enriching cultural experience. And this is what makes Giancarlo
Esposito such a fascinating figure. You need only hear him speak his name --
which he pronounces, as they do in his father's Naples, with the "r"
languorously rolled and the emphasis in Esposito on the "spo" rather than the
"si" -- to understand how strongly he embraces the musicality at the heart of
his Italian heritage. He proudly tells the story of his paternal Italian
grandfather, a man of the opera who worked backstage at Naple's San Carlo
theater. With Mussolini's ascendance in the 1920s, fearful of the black shirts
running riot over the theater, he hid the sets to the company's operas all over
the south of Italy. It was this kind of commitment to art that Esposito's
mother found so bracing when she went to Italy to pursue her singing career in
the 1950s. Giancarlo describes her as a "beautiful, dark, stately" woman who
"adopted European consciousness," turning to high art as a refuge against
American racism. When Giancarlo met his mother's brother, he was stunned by
the
contrast between diva and downhome. "Uncle Al, whom I love dearly, he's
country. Couuuuntry. He's a different man. The whole language is different."
Esposito's maternal grandmother played organ in the Pentecostal church; his
mother sang in the chorus. With "sisters falling out in the aisles," it was
one
of those black churches that looks like it might rock off its foundations
during
a rollicking Sunday morning service. Giancarlo's love of performance owes as
much to this vernacular tradition as to the formal vocal training his mother
gave him when he appeared in nine Broadway musicals between the ages of nine
and
fourteen. The Pentecostal church, he says, "was a whole other world for me
[than the Broadway stage] and I grew up in that world too. The lesson was that
you can celebrate your God, you can celebrate your happiness, and you can ask
it
to enter your body."
Spirit reverberating through the voice and the body -- one thinks of the
bravura virtuosity of Enrico Caruso and Louis Armstrong, of Louis Prima
scatting
Jump, Jive an' Wail, of Frank Sinatra crooning bel canto over the limousine
swing of the Count Basie rhythm section on Pennies from Heaven. Song-and-dance
Broadway baby Giancarlo Esposito belting out My Way at his high school
commencement makes mirth of his identity dilemma, but he also invokes the
modern
American tradition of racial and ethnic outsiders sparking fresh cultural
energy
through rhythm, tune, and humor. In particular, Italians, like Jews and
Latinos, have turned to African American urban culture to develop distinctive
performance techniques emphasizing bodily elegance and stylized emotion.
Leave it to the academics to argue whether this kind of mixing and matching is
respectful borrowing or racial theft. For Giancarlo Esposito, the question is
a
matter of living his life the only way he knows: at the crossroads.
In the late 1970s, after his stage career shifted from Broadway musicals to
drama, Esposito won an Obie Award for his performance in the Negro Ensemble
Company's Zoo Man and the Sign. One night during the show's run, a young man
came backstage to introduce himself and compliment Giancarlo on his work. The
well-wisher was a recent NYU film school graduate now making ends meet cleaning
films for Maxie Cohen at First Run Features. He was black and talked with
fervor about his vision for making movies that plumbed the depths of black life
and culture from the inside. He was working on a script called "Homecoming," a
musical that explored fraternity and sorority life at traditionally black
colleges modeled on Morehouse and Spelman. His name was Spike Lee.
"Homecoming" became School Daze (1988), the first of four films in which
Esposito has worked under Lee. Esposito plays Julian, the sadistic fraternity
president in School Daze; Buggin' Out, the amateur political agitator in Do the
Right Thing (1989); Left-Hand Lacey, the dandyish jazz pianist in Mo' Better
Blues (1990); and Thomas Hayer, one of the assassins in Malcolm X (1992). For
a
fledgling actor of color then paying dues with bit parts as a pimp, thief, and
drug dealer in schlocky TV shows and second-rate movies, these roles were like
manna from heaven. None were leading-man vehicles, and none showed the full
range of Esposito's talent and intelligence. But by hitching his wagon to the
rising star of America's hottest young filmmaker, Giancarlo Esposito became a
familiar face, if not a household name.
The most absorbingly personal of these roles was Buggin' Out, a hip-hop
generation black nationalist who looks and sounds like a hybrid of boxing
promoter Don King and rapper Flavor Flav. The movie unfolds on a scorching hot
summer day in the predominately black Brooklyn neighborhood of
Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Buggin' Out patrols the sidewalks with an exuberance
more comic than menacing. His signature valediction, "stay black," comes with
a
soul-brother handshake so elaborately choreographed that it suggests parody as
much as solidarity. When a white Yuppie wearing a Larry Bird, Celtic-green
basketball shirt rudely bicycles over his just-out-of-the-box Air Jordan
sneakers, then compounds the insult by repairing to the stoop of his brownstone
and intoning about his property rights, Buggin' Out stands tall for the 'hood
against this especially boorish representative of white privilege. But he
stops
short of unleashing vengeance, cooling out his posse of b-boys and girls with
an
appeal to the moral superiority of the "righteous black man" with "a loving
heart."
Do the Right Thing was Lee's third movie -- after She's Gotta Have It and
School Daze -- but it was his first to feature non-black characters and to
foreground interracial relations. Lee, who grew up cheek-by-jowl with Italians
in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, turned here to the depiction of New
York
Italians, as he would in Jungle Fever (1992) and in his latest release, Summer
of Sam (1999). Lee wrote the script partly in mind of the folksy ethnic
sociability that distinguishes Italians in the New York imagination. But he
was
also meditating on the strained relations between blacks and Italians that
came
to light most tragically one night in 1986 in the Howard Beach neighborhood of
Queens, when a posse of Italians wielding baseball bats and tree trunks chased
a
black teenager named Michael Griffith on to a highway where he was struck and
killed by a passing car.
The plot of Do the Right Thing centers on the fate of a pizzeria, Sal's
Famous,
owned and operated by the Franziones, an Italian family that commutes to
Bed-Sty
from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn's Italian fortress. The Franziones park their
Cadillac out front of the pizzeria, where it looms large as a parvenu emblem of
material success. For Lee, Sal's pizzeria symbolizes not just the persistence
of economic colonialism in the post-integration era, the flow of capital out of
the black community into the hands of non-black ethnic entrepreneurs -- the
Korean grocery store across the street from Sal's carries that theme just as
well. At Sal's, the stakes are higher than what the cash register tape
reveals;
here, the coin of the realm is respect.
Buggin' Out is plenty miffed by the two dollar surcharge for extra cheese on
Sal's miserly slices, but what really incenses him is Sal's wall of fame, a
photographic shrine to Italian American achievement made up of publicity shots
of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Liza Minnelli, Al Pacino, Joe
Dimaggio, and Luciano Pavarotti. "Yo, Mookie," Buggin' calls out to the
character played by Lee, who works as a delivery man for Sal, played by Danny
Aiello. "How come there ain't no brothers up on the wall?"
Sal's response to Buggin' Out shows none of the loving heart we see elsewhere
in the film, none of the simpatico he urges on his son Pino (John Turturro), an
unreconstructed bigot who thinks "we should stay in our neighborhood and the
niggers should stay in theirs." Sal counters Pino's racist vitriol with
touching
Mediterranean benevolence -- "these kids have grown up on my food, my food. I'm
proud of that" -- but with Buggin' Out he musters only spiteful defensiveness:
"Get your own place, you do what you wanna do. You can put up your brothers and
uncles, nephews and nieces, stepfathers and stepmothers, what you want. But
this
is my pizzeria. American Italians only on the wall." To which Buggin' Out
sharply responds: "Rarely do I see American EYEtalians eating here. All I see
is
black folks. We spend much money here, we should have some say."
Lee's romantic depiction of Styvesant Avenue leans heavily on representations
of black consumer culture: a billboard of Mike Tyson looming over the pizzeria,
Magic Johnson t-shirts, Air Jordan sneakers, Afrocentric body ornaments, and
the
ubiquitous black music sound stream flowing out of Senor Love Daddy's
storefront
radio station two doors down from Sal's. Against this backdrop, one might hear
Buggin' Out's call for a change in the iconography at Sal's as a gesture of
"hip
black separatism," as Joe Klein, the film's sternest critic, suggested. But as
literary critic Tom Ferraro has brilliantly argued, the nuances of the film
instead reveal a Brooklyn urbanism founded on the interethnic common ground
shared by the Franzione family and its black customers. Ferraro eloquently
breaks down the social dynamics at work in Do the Right Thing's interracial
contact zone:
On the strip along Stuyvesant between Quincy and Lexington lies an habitus of
stoops and windows, street mingle, store flow, and music float: less a mean
street than the boulevard of what Herbert Gans once called an 'urban village,'
its open hydrant the fountain of an elongated piazza -- and what we see there
is
the syncopated congress, the opera of the streets: where the individual is
constituted not so much outside of group interaction as through it -- as one or
another archetype or ethnic persona, realized in competitive display, in oral
inventiveness or eloquent silence, in the airing of family linen, intrablock
melodrama, or neighborhood defense; and where the ethical imperative that
emerges is a formidable combination of love and irony, respect and suspicion,
absorption and wariness.
These Italians and blacks are the most passionate of enemies: familiar enemies,
others who are almost the same. Mookie knows how to get under Pino's skin: he
intimates that his kinky hair gives away the tar brush hidden in his family
history. And biological mixing is just prelude to the cultural weave. The
Bensonhurst guidos and the Bed-Sty homeboys inhabit overlapping urban style
worlds marked by syncopated streetwise lingo, body posturing, and a visual
vernacular of hair, clothing, and ubiquitous gold jewelry. They treat their
Air
Jordans and their Cadillacs as organic extensions of their bodies, using them
for purely expressive purposes. They groom and they strut and they emote.
And they scream. None louder or uglier than Buggin' Out and Sal in the
pivotal
showdown that grows into the most incendiary racial conflagration in recent
American cinema. Buggin' Out storms the pizzeria in league with his homey
Radio
Raheem, whose signature boombox blasts Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" at
ear-splitting volume. Sal yells that he wants the music off. Buggin' Out
holds
ground. The two start spewing a skein of racial epithets in each other's
faces. Sal grabs his baseball bat (a grim reference to Howard Beach) and
smashes Raheem's radio to bits. The ensuing melee takes on grisly, tragic
proportions when a policeman squeezes the life out of Radio Raheem with a
brutal
nightstick chokehold. After a moment of eerie calm, the hitherto placid Mookie
strikes his blow for the revolution, flinging a trash can through the front
window of Sal's, sparking a riot that ends with the pizzeria and the Cadillac
in
ruins.
Lee's movie was a big cinematic public mural, a broad-stroke representation of
ethnic pride hardening into racial conflict. Released the summer before an
acrimonious mayoral showdown in which African American David Dinkins bested
Italian American Rudolph Guiliani, Do the Right Thing triggered more public
debate than any film in recent memory. Joe Klein, worried that the film would
incite the city's black youth to riot, denounced Lee's work as a reckless
threat
to public order. Lee expressed outrage at Klein and other critics, accusing
them of putting a higher value on Sal's property than on Radio Raheem's life.
For Esposito, there was a devastatingly intimate reality beneath the film’s
colorful surface and controversial reception. At the time of the Howard Beach
incident, Esposito's father was teaching Italian at a public school in that
very
same Queens neighborhood. Giancarlo's parents had divorced years earlier, and
while he had grown somewhat estranged from his father, he deeply craved a
stronger bond with him. "I didn't know if I was doing him proud as a son,
because I could never be as Italian as he is -- I can't speak the language as
clearly as he does." Curious to check out Howard Beach, but as fearful as any
other brown-skinned person of stepping foot there, Giancarlo joked with his
father about coming to visit one of his classes. It was one of those jokes
that
disguises an undercurrent of pain. In Howard Beach, Esposito senior had
assimilated into white America, but the son remained persona non grata. "Deep
inside me, there was resentment," he says. "He could be accepted in that world
and I could never be."
The script of Do the Right Thing heightened Esposito's inner conflict. "I
started thinking about my relationship with my dad, and about my long journey,
having been born the son of an Italian man and a black woman. The movie was
part
of the catharsis I went through to release a lot of anger that I had built up.
Playing an angry black man allowed me to say: 'I refuse to live in that space
that says I am not good enough, a world that will not accept me because of the
color of my skin.'" Complicating matters was the rapport Esposito enjoyed with
John Turturro, Richard Edson, and Danny Aiello, the actors who were playing the
Italian characters. The bonding ran deepest with Aiello, a man who "was the
same color skin as my dad" and who seemed to be able to relate to Giancarlo in
ways that his father had come up short.
This camaraderie worried Lee, who tried to keep the two from fraternizing.
"Spike's style," Esposito explains, "is to make his actors enemies [off-camera]
because he wants the real thing to appear on screen. In School Daze, he
separated the jigaboos from the wannabees and even put them in different
hotels. It was freaking everybody out because people had friends on the other
side, but Spike wanted war. I understood it. He's a new filmmaker, and that's
his way of creating the tension he needs. But it was frightening to me because
he was manipulating people in a way that's different than just directing. It
was about manipulating who people are. If you can do that as a director, you
probably get a better scene or a better movie. But I didn't agree with it. I
felt that what I do is act. I don't have to carry that hate inside me."
Whatever the virtues or defects of Lee's approach -- call it Method directing
-- the upshot was a stunningly powerful blow-up between Buggin' Out and Sal.
Beyond the reach of Lee's directorial hand, however, the scene also served as a
poignantly shared personal epiphany for Esposito and Aiello. "We got to that
scene and an amazing thing happened," Esposito discloses. "Everyone is going
nuts and screaming. All of a sudden I felt all these years and years of rage.
And Danny, who I never heard curse -- ever -- started cursing. I can't
remember
exactly what he said, but it was something really, really different. Not a
typical epithet, not just 'nigger.' It reminded me of what my mother had taught
me. She said, 'When someone calls you something you have to say something
back.' Danny had learned that lesson too. We started screaming at each other
and some of the things that came out of his mouth I had never heard before. I
could not believe it. Some of the things that came out of my mouth I also
couldn't believe."
"It was a really harrowing moment for both of us. We were staring into each
other's eyes, and all the anger from all those years came right out. Needless
to say, we got an amazing scene. Spike was going nuts. He loves it. Danny
starts to cry. I start to cry and we start to hug. We hugged each other for
at
least twenty minutes. We didn't want to take that anger out of the scene,
didn't want to take it away with us."
If Lee’s resolve to take on the hard issues of race gave Esposito a place to
release his dramatic power, other aspects of Lee’s filmmaking were in tension
with Esposito’s betwixt and between sensibility. Despite a strong friendship
buoyed by their shared passion for jazz and sports, Esposito doesn't shy from
talking about the frictions with Lee. In what he calls a "vehement
disagreement," Esposito sat out the filming of Jungle Fever, Lee's 1991 movie
about a love affair between Flipper, a married African American architect from
Harlem's Striver's Row (Wesley Snipes) and Angie, an Italian American office
temp from lower-middle- class Bensonhurst (Annabella Sciorra). Lee's
inspiration for the movie was the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black
teenager
who was attacked by a mob of Italian youths in Bensonhurst. "Harlem and
Bensonhurst for me are more than just geographical locations; it's what they
represent," Lee told Newsweek. "Yusuf was killed because they thought he was
the black boyfriend of one of the girls in the neighborhood. What it comes
down
to is that white males have problems with black men's sexuality. It's as plain
and simple as that. They think we've got a hold on their women."
Esposito, whose entire family life has been built around interracial
marriages,
found Lee's thinking narrow-minded. "I was just crushed about it, crushed. I
thought, get smart, get some serious issues out there. When I confronted him
he
said to me, 'Look Giancarlo, it's called "Jungle Fever," that's all it is.'"
For Lee, the relationship could only function as a projection of racial
mythology: a white woman's fantasies about sexual equipment, a black man's
curiosity about forbidden fruit. But the movie fails to develop even this
cliche: the relationship has no passion, no frisson. The only energy around it
is the hysteria it unleashes in the lovers's families. Implausibly, the black
architect's wife deals with her marital crisis not by worrying about the effect
it might have on the couple's young daughter, but by convening a talk-show
style
caucus of black women to kvetch about white women's obsession for black men.
More plausibly, but so impulsive and overheated as to become a parody of
Italian
hotheadedness, the temp's stone racist father, upon learning of the
relationship, beats his daughter to a bloody pulp.
In Jungle Fever as in Do the Right Thing, Lee does his best to show Italians
at
their paranoic, loathsome worst. (Those caricatures have now been surpassed by
the Bronx primitives featured in Lee's latest work, Summer of Sam. These are
Italians so subhuman that John Turturro, in his off-camera role as the voice of
the dog who addles the mind of "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz, is just
about the most articulate of the lot). "For Lee," critic David Denby wrote in
a
description of the Bensonhurst guidos of Jungle Fever, "Italianness is mostly a
disgrace. These people have no class."
Denby is right that the characters played in that movie by Nicholas Turturro
and Michael Baladucco, "local layabouts wasting their days at a candy store
pour[ing] out their hatred of blacks," are meant to signify moral shame in
Bensonhurst's most xenophobic quarters. But this doesn't quite explain the
paradox of why these racists seem so much more interesting and compelling - so
much more alive -- than Lee's black characters. Lee's black characters in
these
early films are archetypes; they deliver public manifestos on the problems of
the race. His Italian characters are who they are. They live and breathe.
Spike Lee is a race man, but he's also a product of Brooklyn's interethnic
cultural milieu. Esposito thinks that in Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing
Lee "had a better feel for the Italian stuff. It made more sense. It was more
natural. It was more flowing than the African American stuff. Maybe it was
that Spike grew up around all these Italians and it was in his blood more than
he even knew." What saves Jungle Fever for Esposito are the Bensonhurst
scenes. For all of the odiousness of what's said in the candy store, Esposito
sees a social flow there that's not equaled in the Harlem scenes. "I know
those
guys, and those guys know each other," he says.
For Esposito, the only true romance in the movie is found in Bensonhurst, and
it comes in an interracial coupling that seems to contradict Lee's ideological
blueprint. Angie's longtime boyfriend Paulie (John Turturro), harassed by the
candy-store chorus as a race traitor for craving the education that will get
him
out of Bensonhurst, falls for Orin (Tyra Ferrell), the black woman who
patronizes his store and encourages him to apply to college . She has class,
and she sees the gentle soul of this deeply pained man. "That relationship,
that was what made the movie for me," says Esposito. "It wasn't about Wesley
and Anna. John and Tyra, they were in love. It was beyond anything you can
label. That's what life is about, it's about that kind of innocence. It
doesn't matter how different people are. Did you ever meet people who don't
speak the same language, yet they are in love? It's magnificent. That kind of
love is the language of the world."
When Esposito points out that Spike Lee has given John Turturro more parts
than himself, he means it as a tribute to Lee, a defense against the critics
who
accused the director of a Crow Jim vision and hiring policy. But the truth is
that Turturro has found a niche that still largely eludes Esposito: a hip, edgy
ethnic Italian. The role Esposito prizes as his "most Italian" was one he
created for himself whole cloth in the 1995 indie film Blue in the Face,
improvising on the situations set up by writer Paul Auster and director Wayne
Wang. The movie, like its better-known twin Smoke, is a hymn to what Auster
referred to in a publicity interview as "The People's Republic of Brooklyn,"
complete with statistics on the borough's polyglot ethnicity (2.5 million
inhabitants, ninety different ethnic groups, 1,500 churches, synagogues, and
mosques), and documentary video footage of local characters who reek of
authenticity. Esposito’s character is one of the regulars who hang out in
Augie’s (Harvey Keitel) cigar store reading the racing form, copping a smoke,
shooting the breeze.
Esposito's climactic riff comes when a black con artist (Malik Yoba) wanders
into the store, hawking some Rolex watches. "I got the African price and the
European price," he announces. Looking warily at Augie, he says "I deal with
the
African first. Black people first always." He turns to Esposito, and the two
start trading fours:
Esposito: "I'm not from Africa. My name is Tommy Finelli. That's my name."
Yoba: "What you doing hanging out in this neighborhood, man? How'd you get the
name Finelli?
Esposito: "This is my neighborhood. I'm from Italy. My father's Italian, my
mother's black."
Yoba: "You ain't no mulatto, you as black as me. Y'all wanna be white, that's
the problem."
Esposito: "How do you know what I am?"
Whatever else he is, Esposito is an actor who treats his craft like a
sacrament, consecrating it with deep knowledge of the rites and practices of
the
cultural traditions he's inherited and studied. The improvisational format of
Blue in the Face allowed him to get up a costume from his own wardrobe of
antique clothes and "to think jazz." "I'm a big jazz fan, huge, huge,"
Esposito
says. He speaks of friendships with Dexter Gordon, Lee Konitz, Philly Jo
Jones,
and Russell Procope, and lets on that he's now studying jazz alto sax to
"loosen
up" a bit from the classical piano he's played since his childhood. "Jazz has
no
barriers," he says. "It doesn't say that you have to be on Channel Seven or
Channel Four. It's a personal expression of who you are. Your history comes
out in notes and melodies and chords."
Sporting a porkpie hat and the easy hipster pose of a Count Basie sideman,
Esposito takes his solo time in Blue in the Face to evoke a person and an
experience that remain deeply etched in his memory. The name Tommy Finelli pays
tribute to the man who sold him his first house, one of those Italians whose
lovingly-tended backyard sings out to the neighborhood like a beautiful melody.
"I remember feeling so at home on this little piece of land," Esposito recalls.
"It was just a little 75 by 100 foot lot, but every inch of it bore fruit.
Cherry trees, a plum tree, a pear tree, an apple tree. You see, the Italians,
they love working with their hands. They're about the earth, about nature, and
sustaining themselves, by themselves. It's one of the things I've always loved
the Italians for, one of the many things." As he talks, Esposito mimics the
hand movements of a man working the soil, and the effect is just as expressive
as when he demonstrates Thelonious Monk's hand-spread on the keyboard and
Charlie Parker's fingering of the alto sax. For Esposito, arboriculture meets
jazz craft in the laying on of hands.
It was this cultural borderland that Esposito hoped to explore even further in
his role as Mike Giardello on Homicide: “a guy who could relate to all the
guineas with no problem and then could step across the line and go ‘Yo what’s
up?”
In writer/producer Tom Fontana, Esposito saw a kindred spirit, a crossover
dreamer alert to the myriad ways that lived experience and the imagination
refuse to abide the color line. With St. Elsewhere, Homicide, and the
extraordinary HBO series Oz to his credit, Fontana is the hottest writer in
television. He grew up in a Sicilian family that worked in the bar busines in
the racially mixed neighborhoods of Buffalo. With Baltimore native Barry
Levinson and the show’s other writers, he took it as his charge to “write the
city accurately.” Above all, this meant capturing the city’s ethnic character.
“Baltimore is a brown city. To pretend otherwise would have been
irresponsible. This is where Little Italy rubs right against the projects. We
wanted characters who could travel both sides of the street.”
Homicide, which was cancelled after seven seasons, didn’t need NAACP pressure
to realize the virtues of a racially integrated cast. Or to portray race as
complexly and interestingly as any other television show to date. The show
eschewed happy endings and did its best to resist pleas from network suits for
more chase scenes. The driving pulse of the show was not so much the plot as
the dialogue, zesty repartee that registered the quirks, vulnerabilities, and
complicated inner lives of the idiosyncratic cast of characters that made up
the
detective team.
In hatching Mike Giardello, Homicide opened up more opportunity for its clever
treatment of black and Italian exchange. In Al Giardello (Yaphet Kotto),
Mike’s
father, the show offered a black Italian who's more Old World than old school:
he delivers aphorisms in the original Italian, stares people down with the
malocchio (evil eye), and condemns the nouvelle pseudo-Mediterranean cuisine on
Baltimore's trendy waterfront as an accursed Yuppie affectation. A deeply
passionate man, he's given to alternating bouts of fiery rage and weepy
sentimentality.
Fontana had no trouble seeing himself in Pembleton, (Andre Braugher), a
Jesuit-trained, black supercop known for his jackknife temper and ruthless
interrogation methods, his struggles with his Catholic faith, and his
existential raps on personal redemption and the integrity of the soul. “The
character was a part of Tom,” Esposito says. “He wrote Pembleton as if to say,
‘It doesn;t matter what color the person is who serves as my alter ego or
voice.”
Yaphet Kotto was just as game to explore the possibilities of straddling
racial
boundaries. “Yaphet brought so much to the role,” says Fontana. “He really
captures this guy’s schizophrenic personality. He’s both an angry black man and
a brooding Sicilian. His Sicilian side was incredible. On the set we would
say,
‘He’s out Brando-ing Brando’ [as Don Corleone in The Godfather]. He was always
pushing the writers, ‘Give me some more Italian lines.’”
With "Gee" serving as a backdrop, Homicide burrowed deeper into the
black/Italian theme. When Latino actor Jon Seda joined the cast, he declined
the
role of the show’s first Latino detective: he wanted to be Sicilian. When his
character, Falsone, and black detective Stivers (Toni Lewis) investigate a set
of murders in Baltimore's West Indian community, Stivers grouses to her partner
about West Indian blacks's superior attitude toward African Americans. Falsone
nods knowingly: "It's like the northern Italians, they get confused sometimes,
think they're Swiss or something, different than Sicilians."
Esposito’s Mike Giardello had yet to really take shape when NBC finally pulled
the plug on Homicide. “I’ve known Giancarlo for twenty years,” Fontana says.
“We literally wrote the part for him. We were creating a character who knows
the town, but he’s also an outsider. There’s a lot of stuff he’s trying to
work
out with his father. We wanted to put it all in there: the pain, the
reconciliation, all the emotions.”
In the two-hour movie that NBC aired in February 2000 to close out the
Homicide
story, Captain Al Giardello, now running for mayor, takes an assassin’s bullet
while on the campaign stump. Emergency surgery gives Gee a few more hours of
life. He uses it well, eschewing his intravenous feeding tube in favor of a
dish of gnocci. He chides Michael for settling for a rushed lunch of mediocre
Chinese take-out. The essence of Italianata, the father tells the son, is
always – always – to take the time to eat well.
Esposito and Fontana “never quite got there” with Mike Giardello, Esposito
rues. I ask Esposito where he wanted to go with Mike Giardello. “I wanted him
to be more Italian,” he tells me.
What would it take for Giancarlo Giuseppe Allesandro Esposito, son of Giovanni
Esposito of Naples, to be able to pass as an Italian in America? Will his
picture ever appear on a Brooklyn pizzeria wall alongside those of Sinatra,
DeNiro, and Pacino? Would it matter that his picture also graces the walls of
Harlem barbershops, where he's the son of opera diva Elizabeth Foster Esposito?
Giancarlo Esposito's life story and his art force us to ask just how ready we
really are to imagine a truly interracial society that reflects the truth of
our
race-defying DNA. Esposito knows better than most how far we must go to build
such a society. On his recent trips to Italy, he has come to the realization
that color matters there in ways he wouldn't have been able to understand as a
child. In Naples, he has seen Ethiopian immigrants -- a reminder of Italy's
colonial history in Africa -- struggle against their pariah status. In New
York, recent conversations with his father -- now married to a Haitian woman --
have ruefully noted the case of the Italian American police officer who
brutalized the innocent Haitian Abner Louima..
Still, Esposito remains the inveterate crossover dreamer. When I ask him
which of his roles teaches his children the best lesson, he barely hesitates:
its Yo-Yo in Night On Earth. Costumed as a walking signifier of early '90s
inner-city blackness, Yo-Yo tries desperately to hail a Manhattan cab back to
Brooklyn. Spurned by several drivers, finally he's picked up an East German
immigrant who can barely speak English, has no idea where Brooklyn is, and
......can't even drive the car. "It's the great equalizer -- everybody
drives,"
Esposito says. "But he can't drive. (He laughs). All right, Yo-Yo thinks,
'You
don't speak any English, and you can't drive. Let me drive myself home.' And
I
do. Now think about it: what possesses this guy to trust me, an out black guy,
to take over the wheel?
In Brooklyn, Yo-Yo picks up his sister, played with sassy ebullience by Rosie
Perez, and the two poke fun at this hapless immigrant. But then comes a
turnaround, a magical epiphany. "It turns out that this driver, Helmut, is a
clown. A real clown, I mean. He pulls out his clown's nose: he used to be in
the circus." Helmut's innocence, his guilelessness, is so pure that it
completely disarms Yo-Yo: he sees clear through to his own prejudice.
"This is what life is really about,” says Esposito.: The person that you
think you know so well -- he's stupid, he's naive, he's a foreigner -- well, it
turns out that you don't really know him at all. And then he shares with you a
pearl, a gift that is so magnificent, it completely changes the way you think
about the world. It teaches you to stay open-minded, because you never know
where the next pearl will come from."
'
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