Giancarlo Esposito, who is best known for portraying Gus Fring in the AMC series Breaking Bad, featured in this year's The Jungle Book as the voice of Akela, the leader of the Indian wolves. But the Denmark-born actor is surely not content with his involvement with Disney, as he wants to further extend it with a role in a Marvel movie.
In a recent interview with Comic Book, Giancarlo says that he knows Marvel belongs to Disney and that he loves people at Marvel before revealing a very strange decision he made just to keep his chances of appearing in one of their movies alive. He turned down a role they offered him in one of their television ventures! The 58-year-old actor explains:
We’ve been trying to figure out how to collaborate on something. I’m hoping that it is something. They came to me with something for their television department, then I realized if I did that, I’d never be able to have that same character be in that film department. Once you’re in a Marvel character in the television version, you have to stay in the particular character. They can’t carry that over to film.
Of course, we know that Marvel's big and small screen ventures are all parts of the same Marvel Cinematic Universe. But have we seen a character from a Marvel television series appear in one of their movies?
Okay, Clark Gregg's Phil Coulson did appear in movies like Iron Man 2, Thor, and The Avengers, but that was before Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. started airing. However, characters from the movie universe like Nick Fury and Lady Sif have appeared in the ABC series.
Many speculated that The Defenders would feature in the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War, but Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn recently said that we won't get to see "much interaction between the Marvel TV universe and the MCU in the near future".
So, apparently, Giancarlo's decision of passing up a Marvel TV role in hopes that he could grab one in a Marvel movie seems quite sensible.