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Giancarlo Esposito
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Giancarlo Esposito (born April 26, 1958) is an American film and television actor.
Born in Denmark to an Italian father and an African-American mother, Esposito lived in Europe, New York, and Cleveland until the family settled in Manhattan when he was six. At the age of ten he made his Broadway debut in the short-lived Maggie Flynn. Additional New York theatre credits include The Me Nobody Knows, Lost in the Stars, Seesaw, and Merrily We Roll Along.
Throughout most of the 1980s Esposito appeared in small roles in films such as Maximum Overdrive, King of New York, and Trading Places and TV shows such as Miami Vice and Spenser: For Hire, until landing his breakout role as a conflicted, light-skinned college student in director Spike Lee's 1988 film School Daze. Over the next four years, Esposito and Lee collaborated on three other movies: Do the Right Thing, Mo' Better Blues, and Malcolm X.
Esposito is probably best known for his portrayal of Agent Mike Giardello on the TV crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street, a role he played from 1998 until the series' cancellation in 1999. Other TV credits include NYPD Blue, Law & Order, The Practice, and Fallen Angels: Fearless.
Esposito's career and choice of roles defies pigeonholing; he has portrayed drug dealers (Fresh), cops (The Usual Suspects), political radicals (Bob Roberts) and even a demonic version of the Greek God of Sleep from another dimension (Monkeybone.) His last notable roles were as Muhammed Ali's father in Ali and Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero's friend and collaborator Miguel Algarín in Piñero, both released in 2001.
Esposito's most recent role was Robert Fuentes, a Miami businessman with shady connections, on the UPN television series South Beach. He recorded a public service announcement for Deejay Ra's 'Hip-Hop Literacy' campaign, encouraging reading about Muhammad Ali.