Raúl Esparza
Raúl Esparza is an actor, born 1970.
Esparza is a Broadway leading man who has spent two decades being borrowed by television. The stage reputation predates all of it and is substantial, including a Tony-nominated turn as Bobby in the 2006 revival of Company, and it explains what he brings to a camera: an actor trained to sustain a long unbroken speech in front of a thousand people does not flinch at a courtroom monologue.
Which is precisely what Law & Order: Special Victims Unit used him for. Rafael Barba began as a recurring prosecutor in the show's fourteenth season and became a regular from the fifteenth, giving the series something it had been short of, a lawyer who visibly enjoyed language. He plays clever people who are pleased with themselves, and then finds the loneliness underneath that.
The best work is elsewhere, though. Dr. Frederick Chilton in Hannibal is one of television's great comic grotesques, vain and cowardly and hugely enjoyable, forever walking into rooms he ought to avoid, and Esparza plays him with a delighted self-regard that makes the show funnier than it will admit to being. Around those two roles he has built a solid character-actor line: Alfredo Aldarisio in Pushing Daisies, Don Crowder in Candy, Paul Mendelson in Dopesick, Tony Compagna in Find Me Guilty, a voice part in BoJack Horseman.
Movies (7)
TV (9)
Where to start with Raúl Esparza
Take Hannibal first if you want to understand why people rate him. Chilton is the show's comic relief and somehow its most human character, and Esparza plays vanity as though it were a survival strategy.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is the volume work, and Barba is a rare thing in a procedural, a character who talks like someone who reads. Drop in around his arrival rather than starting the series from 1999.
Pushing Daisies gives him a small role in a show built entirely out of tone. Dopesick and Candy are the recent dramatic ones, both fact-based limited series, both using him as the professional in the room. Find Me Guilty is the early film credit worth digging out, and BoJack Horseman is a decent joke once you know the voice.