Unless you’re living under a ‘blue’ rock, you would be watching or at least be aware of the hype of AMC’s epic drama Breaking Bad starring Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. Cranston playing Walter White, a terminal lung cancer patient Chemistry teacher to turns to cooking crystal meth with his former student Jesse Pinkman (Paul) so he can leave some desirable coin behind for his family when he passes on.
The show is nearing its end, with its fifth season being split into two parts a la The Sopranos sixth season. One of the main characters up until the fourth season – Gus Fring (played by Giancarlo Esposito) was the near-perfect drug lord villain. Anal retentive, neat, clean, thorough, well spoken, always planning 10 steps ahead. He even owned ‘Los Pollos Hermanos’ – a fictional fast food chicken restaurant that was used to help cover up his drug related operatives, as well as a laundromat to cover the chemicals and whatnot that would be involved in meth cooking. That’s until Walter finally got him (watch season four ASAP!).
What is really amusing, while Esposito has appeared in other shows since Breaking Bad, such as playing Pierce Hawthorne’s (Chevy Chase) half brother in Community, he has appeared in previous shows such as Homocide: Life On The Street as an FBI Agent, and NYPD Blue.
But this caught my eye. If you go back even further, we were exposed to a relatively unknown Esposito, working as a Summer Camp ‘Team Leader’ named Mickey, in five episodes of Sesame Street, back in 1982.
His role? To help everyones’ favourite chicke… I mean yellow-winged buddy, Big Bird, to learn what life is like to go on summer camp and meet friends.
His appearance lasted 5 episodes – which is long enough to recruit some wheel-and-dealers for his future empire of the ‘blue rock’.
