Giancarlo Esposito Controls the Chaos

When Giancarlo Esposito stepped off the escalator at MOMA, a trio of security guards—all young men, Black or Latino—greeted him with knowing salutes. Who, I wondered, did they see? Was it Gus Fring, the fussy, stoical drug lord of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul”? Or Stan Edgar, the biotech C.E.O. who manufactures superheroes in Amazon’s Marvel satire “The Boys”? Maybe they’d seen him in “Do the Right Thing,” shouting a question as contentious in contemporary-art museums as it was in Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy pizzeria: “How come you ain’t got no brothers up on the wall?” But Esposito, a tenacious veteran of stage and screen who has become one of the most familiar faces in television, has played so many dastardly bosses and charismatic troublemakers that it almost didn’t matter which one.