'Parish' star Giancarlo Esposito stops by The Hollywood Reporter's studio in Park City during the Sundance film festival to talk about the series, which focuses on a family man in New Orleans, whose son is violently murdered, his business collapses and old habits resurface. Esposito reveals how the project related to an experience that he had lived.
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00:00 What do I do?
00:02 What's more important?
00:03 Is it that I survive or that my children survive
00:06 and my wife survives to take care of them?
00:09 And so that was a really emotional point for me in my life
00:14 and that's what drew me to Parrish.
00:15 (upbeat music)
00:17 At a certain point in my career,
00:21 I realized that what I do the best
00:23 is what I'm really connected to.
00:25 And so when this came to me through my manager
00:28 and I like to call him my producing partner now,
00:31 Josh Kesselman was the British version of this show
00:34 which was called "The Driver".
00:35 And what I loved about it was that it had a very
00:39 dramatic characterization about it
00:43 coming out of an edgy situation.
00:45 And it felt to me that it was driven
00:49 not only because it was called "The Driver"
00:50 but driven by human emotion.
00:53 And so I was looking for something to develop
00:56 that could be my future.
00:58 When you're able to do a lot of different kinds of work
01:03 and work with great people,
01:04 you sort of get focused about
01:06 what you wanna do for yourself.
01:07 And so I look at Parrish as a gift to myself.
01:11 We of course changed the title from "The Driver".
01:13 It was three two-hour movies that was done in the UK.
01:16 It was a really genre piece that was inclusive of action.
01:20 But what got me was that it was a story about a man
01:24 who wasn't quite measuring up.
01:26 He wasn't able to take care of his family.
01:29 He was not fully respected the way he wanted to be
01:33 by his family.
01:35 And he's a family man with a few children
01:38 and you come to find out a surprise
01:40 that maybe one of those children isn't alive anymore.
01:42 So all of these things in the original really drew me in.
01:45 But the major thing that really focused me
01:49 was that it came from an experience that I had lived.
01:53 And that experience was not being able to pay the rent,
01:58 not being able to put food on the table,
02:01 really coming to my wits end,
02:03 feeling like what do I do?
02:06 What's more important?
02:08 Is it that I survive or that my children survive
02:10 and my wife survives to take care of them?
02:15 And so that was a really emotional point for me in my life.
02:19 And that's what drew me to Parrish.
02:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]