When it comes to fictional entertainment, you don’t get more villainous than Giancarlo Esposito; he’s recently been announced as a dastardly Cuban dictator in Far Cry 6; he plays the The Child snatching Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, and – most importantly – he tries to go against my beloved Colonel Sanders in Breaking Bad.
Which is why fans have been petitioning for the Do The Right Thing actor to star as the next big antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Seriously, snap me out of existence, and I’m okay, but put methamphetamine in my popcorn chicken, and I’ll be pissed.)
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight about the possible rumours, Giancarlo Esposito said:
Well, there’s been all these rumours about being with Marvel; I want to work with those guys. I put it out there all the time. I haven’t created any of those rumours, but I worked years ago with Louis D’Esposito – who’s one of the guys at Marvel – back when he was doing The Cotton Club and I was doing The Cotton Club. What they do is fantastic, and I want to do something enduring with them. I think the Marvel world would be, likely, the next step for me…”
Entertainment Tonight
This is Marvel we’re talking about, so the fans had absolutely nothing to say on the matter.
I’m only saying that so the MCU super-nuts don’t get annoyed with me. Have they gone? They have? Good.
Twitter, reddit and everywhere else on the internet was flooded with casting suggestions for Giancarlo, including…
Norman Osborn
In the past, Green Goblin’s alter-ego, Norman Osborn, has been played by Hollywood icons such as Willem Dafoe and Chris Cooper. Could the MCU cast someone even more threatening than those two? (A sentence I didn’t even think was possible to say.)
After all, Norman is essentially a less meth-y version of Gus Fring.
Magneto
The most popular theory is that Giancarlo will portray X-Men’s Magneto in an upcoming MCU film, following in the footsteps of Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender.
One redditor suggested that they update Magneto’s backstory – and whilst keeping his tragedy of unimaginable proportion; altering it from escaping a German concentration camp, to surviving the Rwandan genocide of the nineties.
Kang the Conqueror
During his final seconds on Breaking Bad, Giancarlo’s character, Gus Fring, ever so boldly adjusted his tie, despite having half of his face blown off by a bomb. You don’t get much more bad-ass than that.
That is until you met Kang the Conqueror; a Marvel villain who can time-travel, possesses genius-level intellect and also has a gun that saps will. (Poor Will. What did he ever do to Kang?!)
Mephisto
It seems fitting that Giancarlo, an actor so prone to playing villains, would pull off the role of Mephisto, a quite literal demon.
Unfortunately this casting choice seems improbable, as it’s unlikely that Marvel will be working on a Ghost Rider movie anytime soon. (I will, however, commit myself into putting Giancarlo in Nicholas Cage’s film of the same name, as it’s what the world deserves.)