By: Russ Burlingame on August 10, 2012
In real life, those survivalist/militia types tend to scare most people…and those they don’t scare tend to mock them for their paranoia and seemingly backward ways.
But what if it turned out the really did go to heck in a handbasket tomorrow? Would those guys still be creepy nutjobs, or would we suddenly see their value? Veteran actor Giancarlo Esposito gets to explore that question in NBC’s forthcoming series Revolution, being filmed right now in North Carolina.
“We begin our story in a world where there’s no power, no cell phones, no computers,” Esposito explains of Revolution. “Everything has gone to black.”
Esposito’s character, Captain Tom Neville, is the head of the militia and an enforcer who acts on behalf of “The Republic of Monroe.” Clips from the show see him terrorizing a small town and arresting a man who confronts him to claim that the townsfolk have already paid their taxes. Neville appears to be played with the signature white collar smarm that has made Esposito one of TV’s most sought-after bad guys, most recently appearing in shows like Breaking Bad and Community (although many of us still remember him as Bugs Raplin, the conspiracy theorist and independent newspaper reporter in Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts).
“Captain Neville is a villain,” acknowledges the actor. “He is a bad guy. He comes into this world, he takes someone away with him and he needs to be able to bargain to find someone else that he needs…which all leads to and links into what happened the day of the blackout fifteen years ago.”
In reality, though, the character isn’t a mustache-twirling maniac; he just wants to turn the lights back on, by any means necessarily. Esposito is introspective about the show, which he describes as exciting. ”I think it’s an amazing world that they’ve created here. It’s a world that has hope in it but has us reconnecting to what really is important in terms of the land and the Earth, and relationships.”
