'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.
00:00What do I do? What's more important? Is it that I survive or that my children survive and my wife survives to take care of them?
00:09And so that wasn't a really emotional point for me in my life, and that's what drew me to Paris.
00:18At a certain point in my career, I realized that what I do the best is what I'm really connected to.
00:24And so when this came to me through my manager, and I like to call him my producing partner now, Josh Kesselman, was the British version of this show, which was called The Driver.
00:35And what I loved about it was that it had a very dramatic characterization about it coming out of an edgy situation.
00:45And it felt to me that it was driven, not only because it was called The Driver, but driven by human emotion.
00:52And so I was looking for something to develop that could be my future.
01:00When you're able to do a lot of different kinds of work and work with great people, you sort of get focused about what you want to do for yourself.
01:07And so I look at Paris as a gift to myself.
01:11We, of course, changed the title from The Driver.
01:13It was three two-hour movies that was done in the UK.
01:16It was a really genre piece that was inclusive of action.
01:20But what got me was that it was a story about a man who wasn't quite measuring up.
01:26He wasn't able to take care of his family.
01:29He was not fully respected the way he wanted to be by his family.
01:35And he's a family man with a few children.
01:38And you come to find out a surprise that maybe one of those children isn't alive anymore.
01:42So all of these things in the original really drew me in.
01:45But the major thing that really focused me was that it came from an experience that I had lived.
01:53And that experience was not being able to pay the rent, not being able to put food on the table,
01:59really coming to my wits' end, feeling like, what do I do?
02:06What's more important?
02:08Is it that I survive or that my children survive and my wife survives to take care of them?
02:15And so that wasn't a really emotional point for me in my life.
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