How Better Call Saul filmed Giancarlo Esposito with broken ankle
Over the past couple of months, it’s possible that you heard a story or two about Esposito filming scenes as Gus Fring despite having a broken ankle. As you can imagine, that’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. Gus didn’t have a broken ankle, after all, so production had to do whatever they could in order to mask what was really going on with the ankle and make some of the scenes come across as natural as humanly possible. Even if they weren’t.
For some more on all of this, just take a look at what Giancarlo had to say via The Hollywood Reporter in a new interview:
“I have to be very grateful and thankful to the family of Better Call Saul for their support and their love … We were four episodes to the end. I came back and did everything with my knee bent behind me on a box. I would rotate my body on the box to be able to make it look like I just stepped into the shot … I [also] did four episodes in four days of all of the stuff that I had missed, and it’s seamless. I called [co-creator] Vince Gilligan and Vince was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it looks great. No one ever will know.’ So I was happy to be supported in that way.”
The series also used stand-ins where applicable so that it would be easier for Esposito to be able to recover and work, but not in a way that caused him any long-term pain. This is the sort of freak accident that happens sometimes with show business — you can try to take every precaution possible to stop some bad stuff from going down, but the reality remains that every now and then, something’s gonna happen that you just can’t prepare for. The #1 thing that production can do is try to be flexible, and work in order to create some ways for the series to keep moving in the event that they hit a bump in the road somewhere along the way.
Throughout the past couple of seasons of Better Call Saul, we’ve gotten a chance to see some of the early days of the partnership between Gus Fring and Mike Ehrmantraut. It’s one that has given Esposito’s character the ability to further expand some of his empire and become more of the power player that he was within Breaking Bad. His origin story is, as a whole, quite different from many others’, mostly in that he was already on the road to becoming something at the start of the series. That’s quite a contrast to a number of other characters within this world.
What do you want to see when it comes to Gus’ story moving forward now on Better Call Saul? Be sure to share in the comments. (Photo: AMC.)