Giancarlo Esposito is knocking once again on AMCs’s door, starring and executive producing the network’s upcoming BBC remake of The Driver. It will mark their third collaboration following the Emmy-stashing crime drama Breaking Bad and its ongoing prequel Better Call Saul.
The show was announced by AMC Networks on March 8th with a six-episode first season that will retool the 2014 BBC miniseries, which starred fellow AMC alum David Morrissey (The Walking Dead). The American version will place Esposito in a new type of face-off as the taxi-driving protagonist Vince, who “agrees to chauffer a New Orleans-based, Zimbabwean gangster notorious for exploiting undocumented immigrants at the U.S. southern ports.”
Though the plot seems to be rife with compromising moral quandaries, Esposito’s working-class cabbie might just explain it away with the same credo as a certain meth kingpin: “A man provides.”
In the network’s official announcement, Esposito shared he was “over the moon excited, enthused, and inspired to be in collaboration with the stellar network and creative team of AMC! Thanks for believing in me. It’s great to be back home!”
The Driver brings back the original’s co-creator Danny Brocklehurst, who developed the series with Sunu Gonera (FX’s Snowfall) with showrunner Theo Travers (Billions, House of Lies). It is expected to debut on AMC and its streaming service AMC+ in 2023.
Gonera traced the remake’s origins back to “four years ago in my manager Josh Kesselman’s living room when he said, ‘Giancarlo is keen to play an everyman as his next role. There’s a British show he loves called The Driver. Would you watch the pilot and see if you could come up with a take you both could get excited about?’ Um, would I? You had me at Giancarlo and everyman.”
The news arrives as a reassuring extension of the partnership between Esposito and AMC as Better Call Saul heads into its sixth and final season on April 18th. In the addition to his critically-celebrated turn as Gus Fring, Esposito is splitting time between yet another Emmy-nominated role as Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, the superhero drama The Boys and its animated counterpart Diabolical, and the upcoming heist series Jigsaw.
