Batman: Assault on Arkham’s Giancarlo Esposito Would Have Liked To Do Suicide Squad

He may have found work at Disney under Iron Man filmmaker Jon Favreau in The Jungle Book — out on Blu-ray and DVD this week — but Breaking Bad‘s Giancarlo Esposito’s comic book roles thus far have all been animated — and they’ve mostly been DC.

Esposito, who played Ra’s al Ghul in Son of Batman, also had a role in the animated adaptation of Axe Cop. And fairly recently, the actor played Black Spider in Batman: Assault on Arkham, the first feature-length movie to feature the Suicide Squad.

During a chat about The Jungle Book and all things movies earlier this week — the full text of which will run tomorrow — Esposito said that he was proud to have been a part of the animated version and that it “would have been fun” to play a part in director David Ayer’s recent live-action Suicide Squad movie — if only because of the film’s talented cast.

“It has been weird,” Esposito said of having a live-action adaptation of the same source material come out so soon after the animated film in which he appeared. “I haven’t seen the film yet. I know, I don’t like to poo poo anything. I know I heard some various different critical comments on how the movie is. I would like to see it because I did work on the animated one. I think it’s a wonderful story. It’s certainly been successful. What does that mean? I’m very happy for their success. I will see. I’m proud to have been part of the animated version. I’m sorry that I wasn’t a part of this version. It probably would have been fun to. I love Will Smith. I love a bunch of the actors in it but haven’t seen it yet.”

When I pointed out that there may still be a role for him — after all, Black Spider didn’t actually appear in Suicide Squad at all, so it’s not as though he was recast — Esposito agreed: “That’s right! So there’s still room for [the sequel] to be even better!” He laughed.

In Batman: Assault on Arkham, Amanda Waller is trying to find a dirty bomb hidden somewhere in Gotham by The Joker. She uses Task Force X to do so, infiltrating Arkham Asylum while Batman is seemingly on a series of wild goose chases. The film is unique among DC’s recent feature-length direct-to-DVD films in that it is set in the world of the Batman: Arkham video game series, and features character designs and plot points from that version of the mythology.

The film was released in August of 2014, two years prior to the theatrical release of Suicide Squad earlier this month, and five months after the Suicide Squad appeared in a hugely popular episode of Arrow.