Why Giancarlo Esposito plays Afro-Latino characters even though he is biracial

Giancarlo Esposito is a face and name well-known for the multitude of roles he has played on the massive and small screen, from the Nineteen Eighties to the current day. However, the actor’s legacy is something that many viewers have long confused.

Spike Lee’s longtime collaborator stopped by SiriusXM today, where he discussed his life, profession and all the pieces in between, his recent AMC crime drama.

Recalling working (and flirting) with legendary singers who broke into the acting world like Madonna and Whitney Houston, host Clay Cane recently realized that Esposito is actually mixed race and never Afro Latino as many appear to consider . In lots of his early roles like this, and even a few of his newer ones, Esposito played Latino characters.

“There is a reason for this,” Esposito explained. “When I stopped playing, you know, all the con artists and killers and robbers and ‘desperate’ characters I was playing that were labeled as African American, I needed a place to go. The only change for me was that I started playing Latino characters because I saw more of them.”

Wanting to flee the frenzied typecasting of stereotypical black characters, Esposito took advantage of the benefits his phenotype afforded him in playing characters that weren’t written as African Americans.

“I was resourceful. I thought, “If I decide not to play this African-American character, I have to start applying another character that I’m playing.” So at that time, Spanish characters, Latino characters, were a little more ‘acceptable’ in our entertainment community.”

Esposito, who was born in Copenhagen and raised in Rome by an Italian father and an African-American mother (they met in Naples while she was studying opera), says he technically plays against type in lots of his African-American roles because he grew up in a very a non-American environment of mixed heritage.

“I come from this multicultural background, which I’m very proud of, but I just play, you know, I play – listen, I was on Jay Leno a few years ago and I said, ‘You know what? I’m an Italian pretending to be an African-American or an American in general, because what really rooted me was this combination of being Italian and this spirituality of being black.”