Giancarlo Esposito Quotes

My advice for achieving success is to make a career choice that reflects your passion. Then work your craft a little bit each day - even if someone's not paying you to do it. Try to balance your social life with your educational (or professional) life, and have patience.

You can never lead unless you follow.

I have this vision that I'm really watching each one of my daughters start to become women, and mothers. And this is what's gonna save our planet.

The beauty of the unexpected and unknown, and it's certainly very tantalizing for me as an actor. Other actors can't deal with that; they want to know, but then they make choices and decisions with that knowledge because that knowledge gives them forethought, and they can think about how they want to play something that takes away spontaneity of what they could be doing.

There is a price to pay for most of our actions. For every action, there is a reaction.

Middle-class people are becoming desperate. It can cause a moral man to break bad.

I often think about, 'How do we return to a simpler way of living? Is there some way that we can start to think of each other as human beings again, instead of worshiping money, instead of worshiping electronics, instead of worshiping getting ahead just for me?'

If I can look at each character that I am given and create them in a different way from the last role, I'm happy.

I just want to serve up the goodness and grace that's been given to me because I made a choice that lined up with my passion. And that's what I tell my kids.

To be a character actor is to be open, to be a chameleon.

People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European, born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe, met my dad, fell in love, and then moved back to Rome, where I was raised, between Rome and Hamburg.

Many times - especially when I'm playing an historical character - I want to be really on target with how I create that character and really nuanced with who that human being might be. But I don't want to lose the likeness of me or the depth of my own personality. So meditation and my spirituality has helped me to realize that, yes, I want to get out of the way but I also want the ability to hold on to what the audience likes of what they see of me.

I'm not too into fast food, but you know if I was, it would be chicken.

Who told you to step on my sneakers? Who told you to walk on my side of the block? Who told you to be in my neighborhood?

I don't think anyone is black and white and I think we change our minds and our attitudes about certain things as we grow to our maturity.

When you have great acting partners, you hope that your reaction to them is propels you deeper into your own character.

We all do things at certain points that are contradictory. Some things, it's a smaller contradiction, and other things it's larger.

Yoga has allowed me to bring my complete spirit together, which allows me to do less, which is more.

I never like to refer back to anything I've done when I'm working on a character, even if that character has the same occupation.

When I listen to my scene partners and listen to their breathing allows me to be connected to them in scenes. I am not trying to multi task, not trying to talk on the phone, but in my character.

I try to be careful with my persuasiveness. When my heart is really behind it, and when I have no ulterior motive, then I know I’m truly persuasive.

I'm impatient sometimes.

I think many people have contradictions to them and I love characters that deal with those contradictions.

I know from teaching, that actors want to act. Even the subtlest actors can do a little too much.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.