Gus Fring

• 1. Introduction

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  Gustavo Fring sells fried chicken in the American Southwest, and the chicken is the least dangerous thing he sells. He is a fictional character played by Giancarlo Esposito in the Breaking Bad franchise. He is one of the main antagonists of the original series, and a protagonist of its spinoff Better Call Saul. Behind his restaurant counter stands a Chilean-American businessman who distributes narcotics across the region and funnels the profits through legitimate companies. Critics have hailed him as one of the best villains in television. His manner is soft-spoken and polite, which is exactly what makes him unsettling. This documentary asks a handful of questions. Why did the writers invent such a calm man to replace a screaming one? Where did he really come from, when no one can find a record of him? What kind of grudge keeps a man patient for twenty years? And how does a person who plans everything finally lose control of the plan?

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• 2. A Foil For Chaos

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  Raymond Cruz had a scheduling conflict. He had committed to appear in The Closer, so he could not continue as Tuco Salamanca in the second season of Breaking Bad. The writers wrote Tuco out of the series and created Gus to be his opposite. Tuco was a meth user and, in the writers' words, "a screaming lunatic". Gus would be "a bit of a buttoned-down, cold-blooded, soft-spoken businessman". He was also meant to stand as a foil to the protagonist, Walter White.

  The name came from outside the story. Gustavo Fring is named after the former German international footballer Torsten Frings.

  Esposito was first offered a part that was described to him as "very admirable, very polite". He decided to play that man as if he had "some kind of a secret". At the time he did not know what the secret was. He still saw that the character could grow, so he turned down offers of guest appearances and insisted on becoming a series regular.

  To achieve Gus's trademark calm, Esposito used yoga techniques. They let him play Gus as "a very good listener". The writers would later supply the secret he had been asked to imagine, and it began with a man named Max.

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• 3. A Businessman With No Past

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  In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the flagship of a fried chicken chain called Los Pollos Hermanos, or The Chicken Brothers, draws customers every day. More of its restaurants stand across the southwestern United States. The firm's chicken farm and distribution center sit on the outskirts of Albuquerque. Gus's second business is an industrial laundry named Lavandería Brillante, which means Bright Laundry.

  The restaurant company is a subsidiary of Madrigal Electromotive GmbH, a multinational based in Germany with ownership stakes in multiple subsidiaries. Gus works with two Madrigal executives. Peter Schuler, a German, serves as company president. Lydia Rodarte-Quayle is the Houston-based vice president of global logistics.

  Gus also works hard at his public image. He is a booster for Albuquerque civic causes, including the local DEA office. He befriends the special agent in charge and makes large donations to the office's charitable events. Underneath the pleasant front, he is ruthlessly cruel and Machiavellian. He employs a number of enforcers and has personally killed both rivals and allies.

  In the Better Call Saul episode "Piñata", Gus sits with a comatose Hector Salamanca and tells him a story about a coati. The animal ate fruit from a lúcuma tree that Gus tended during his childhood in Chile. It is one of very few glimpses of his youth.

  Everything else is inference. Neither the DEA nor his own enforcer, Mike Ehrmantraut, could find any record of him before his arrival in Mexico, so his name is likely an alias. He is supposedly a native of Chile, and cartel members sometimes call him "The Chilean". He emigrated to Mexico in the 1980s, during the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

  In a flashback in the Breaking Bad episode "One Minute", Hector mockingly calls him "Big Generalissimo". That implies a connection to the Pinochet regime. Other hints point to Santiago. In "Magic Man", Lalo Salamanca refers to a mysterious incident involving Gus there. In "JMM", Gus calms a panicking Peter Schuler by mentioning an experience they shared in Santiago.

  In "Hermanos", Don Eladio Vuente says he spared Gus when he ordered another man killed. The reason was Gus's unstated but apparently powerful connection to Chile. Creator Vince Gilligan has said he purposely left the origins ambiguous, comparing them to the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The man Eladio had ordered killed was named Max, and he is the key to everything Gus does.

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• 4. Max And The Grudge

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  Maximino Arciniega, known as Max, was Gus's business associate and romantic partner. According to the episode "Hermanos", the two men started Los Pollos Hermanos as a front to sell methamphetamine that Max cooked. They approached Don Eladio Vuente, leader of the Juárez Cartel, with an offer to expand the drug trade with cartel help.

  Eladio declined, because the cartel preferred to keep distributing cocaine. He had his subordinate Hector Salamanca kill Max for selling meth in cartel territory without permission. Eladio spared Gus but forced him to cooperate with the cartel on Eladio's terms.

  For the next 20 years, Gus stays outwardly loyal to the cartel. Privately he nurses a grudge against Hector, against Eladio, and against Eladio's right-hand man, Juan Bolsa. He waits patiently for his chance at revenge. After establishing himself in Albuquerque, he looks to end his dependence on cartel cocaine by producing and distributing meth in the United States. The Salamanca family business that Hector controls also covers Albuquerque, so Gus must deal with Hector while he works to undermine the family.

  The loss of Max shaped the man he became. It pushed him toward ruthlessness, including the gradual killing of Hector's entire family. It also fed a desire to build a new "family" through his meth empire and his chicken restaurants.

  The relationship between Gus and Max was long implied to be more than business. In 2020, Gilligan said, "I personally think Max was more than just a friend to Gus. I think they probably were lovers." Showrunner Peter Gould confirmed that they were lovers in 2022, on the Ringer podcast The Watch.

  The clues had been scattered through the series. In "Sabrosito", Hector suggests a better name for the restaurants might be "Los Culos Hermanos", or The Butt Brothers, insinuating that Gus and Max were gay. In "Magic Man", Lalo describes Max to Juan Bolsa as Gus's boyfriend.

  In "Dedicado a Max", Gus acquires a small villa on the Mexican side of the border after arriving in Albuquerque. It holds a fountain dedicated to Max and serves as the home of Dr. Barry Goodman. In "Fun and Games", Gus visits a wine bar after eliminating Lalo as a threat. He talks with David, his favorite sommelier, and drops hints of his interest before cutting the visit short.

  Hector, the man who killed Max, would not be granted a quick death.

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• 5. Chess Against The Salamancas

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  Nacho Varga is the thread that first pulls Gus into Mike Ehrmantraut's orbit. Nacho, an associate of the Salamanca family drug business, hired Mike to remove Hector's nephew Tuco from the organization's day-to-day running. Mike instead arranged for Tuco to be arrested. Later Mike prepared to assassinate Hector but was interrupted at the last moment.

  He traced the interruption to Gus, who explained that he wanted to be the one to decide when Hector would die. Gus encouraged Mike to keep disrupting the trucks that carried ice cream store supplies and drugs from Mexico and sent cash back to the cartel. After two shipments were disrupted, Hector demanded that Gus's Los Pollos Hermanos trucks carry both sets of product. Gus had wanted exactly this result, though he appeared to agree reluctantly.

  A quarter of a million dollars gave Mike a problem. He refused payment from Gus and asked instead for help laundering the $250,000 he had stolen from one of Hector's trucks. Gus arranged for Madrigal Electromotive to hire Mike as a contracted security expert and pay him monthly consulting fees.

  Tyrus Kitt, Gus's subordinate, called his boss when Nacho tried to take six kilos instead of the agreed five. Gus saw an opportunity to infiltrate the Salamanca organization and told Tyrus to hand over the extra kilo.

  Bolsa then summoned Gus and Hector to a meeting and announced that the shared use of Gus's trucks would be permanent. Hector's angry outburst led to a stroke. Gus called an ambulance and gave first aid that saved Hector's life, though Hector was left comatose. Nacho had earlier swapped Hector's angina medication for a placebo, and he switched the real medication back so foul play would not be suspected. Gus appeared to notice and said nothing.

  While reviewing Hector's medical records, Gus realized there was no nitroglycerin in Hector's system, so Nacho must have tried to kill him. Gus ambushed Nacho and Arturo Colon at the chicken farm and killed Arturo in front of Nacho. He told Nacho that from then on Nacho belonged to Gus, or the Salamancas would learn the truth. Tyrus and Victor staged the scene to look like the work of the Espinosa Gang. Nacho falsely named the Espinosas to the twin cousins of Tuco, Leonel and Marco, who massacred the gang to recover the "stolen" drugs.

  Gus ordered Hector's treatment halted after Hector regained movement in his right index finger. It left his recovered mind trapped in his unhealed body.

  The underground meth "superlab" came next. Gus and Mike planned it beneath Lavandería Brillante, using a design by the chemist Gale Boetticher. Gus listened in secretly as Mike questioned engineers. He offered the job to Werner Ziegler, impressed by Werner's forthright description of the difficulty and risk.

  Werner missed his wife and escaped the site to rendezvous with her. Mike persuaded Gus to let him bring Werner back rather than have him killed. But Lalo, Hector's remaining nephew, killed a money wire clerk named Fred to follow Mike's trail. Posing as Gus's man, Lalo then pulled details of the lab's construction out of Werner on the phone. Gus concluded Werner must die. Mike accepted responsibility, since Werner had escaped on his watch, and reluctantly killed him himself.

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• 6. Lalo In The Dark

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  Lalo Salamanca stayed suspicious of Gus through the fifth season of Better Call Saul. Gus arranged for Nacho to collect cocaine of inferior quality, and rumors of the "stepped on" product reached Lalo. Lalo confirmed the impurity himself on visits to Salamanca street dealers. Gus then met Lalo and Juan Bolsa and told a cover story. Werner, he said, had been building a chilling system for the chicken farm, then fled after stealing cocaine. To hide the loss, he claimed, he replaced the stolen cocaine with locally produced meth.

  The story explained Werner's departure, Mike's pursuit and Werner's death. Lalo accepted it and the apology but remained suspicious. Bolsa reminded Lalo that Gus enjoyed the trust of Don Eladio. Even so, Gus shut down construction of the lab and sent Werner's workers home. Mike declined Gus's offer to keep paying him during the delay. He was frustrated by Gus's apparent lack of compassion for Werner.

  Gus kept squeezing Nacho for inside information on the Salamancas. When the lawyer Jimmy McGill, who also goes by Saul Goodman, won the release of the Salamanca gang member Domingo Molina, he did it in exchange for the locations of several of Gus's dead drops. Gus let the drops go ahead. On the night of the transfer, he tensely waited as Victor and Diego made sure that the DEA and local police seized nearly a million dollars but found no leads to Gus.

  Mike spent weeks depressed over Werner and drinking to excess. After a local gang injured him, Gus had him taken to the villa just inside the Mexican border, where Dr. Barry Goodman tended his wounds. Gus visited and asked Mike to join his organization, saying that Mike understood his need for revenge.

  The attempt to remove Lalo came in layers. Mike quietly pointed police toward Lalo for Fred's murder, and Lalo was arrested. From jail he had Nacho burn down one of Gus's Los Pollos Hermanos restaurants, and Gus helped to preserve Nacho's cover as a mole by destroying it. Still, Gus wanted Lalo released, because Lalo remained a threat to his legitimate activities even in prison. He had Mike give Jimmy the details of the investigation. Jimmy used them to accuse the police of witness tampering and won bail for Lalo.

  Bail money turned into a desert ordeal. Jimmy drove to a remote location to collect it from the Cousins, and gunmen took the money and prepared to kill him. An unseen shooter, Mike, attacked them. Mike and Jimmy then walked cross-country with the money after a car breakdown, and Mike killed the surviving gunman. Mike later told Gus that Bolsa had ordered the attack to protect Gus's business.

  When Lalo returned to his home in Chihuahua with Nacho, Gus sent gunmen to kill him. Nacho set a kitchen fire as a distraction at 3 a.m. and opened the back gate, after asking that Lalo's family be spared. The gunmen wounded Lalo and killed all the occupants of the house. Lalo escaped through a hidden tunnel, slipped back in and killed all but one gunman. He forced the survivor to call the middleman and report that Lalo was dead.

  In the sixth season, Lalo killed a local farmer to serve as a body double, and the Cousins reported him dead. Gus doubted it. Hector's demeanor at a condolence meeting convinced him that Lalo was alive. Nacho realized that Gus had betrayed him to the cartel. Nacho agreed to give himself up on condition that his father was protected, and Gus planned for Nacho to blame the rival Alvarez family. Instead, Nacho used a piece of broken glass to free himself, seized Juan Bolsa's gun and killed himself.

  Gus began wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a gun. A body double took his place at home, while he used a tunnel system to reach a nearby house. It held an operations center for vast surveillance across Albuquerque. Lalo ambushed Jimmy and his wife Kim Wexler in their apartment, killing Howard Hamlin, and demanded that Jimmy shoot Gus. Jimmy talked Lalo into sending Kim instead. Gus recognized the shooting as a distraction and drove to Lavandería Brillante, where Lalo killed his bodyguards.

  Lalo marched Gus to the construction site, filming it as evidence of disloyalty for Don Eladio. Gus insulted Eladio and the Salamancas on camera as a diversion and caused a power outage. In the darkness he reached the handgun he had hidden in an excavator's track and shot Lalo multiple times. Lalo died in front of him. Mike buried Lalo and Howard beneath the meth lab.

  Eladio summoned Gus, Bolsa, Hector and the Cousins to his pool in Mexico. With no proof that Lalo had survived, Eladio accepted that he had died in the first attempt. To keep peace between Gus and Hector, he divided the drug territory around Albuquerque between them. Gus told Mike to restart work on the lab right away, and a different man was about to walk into it.

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• 7. The Superlab Years

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  Thirty-eight pounds of meth for 1.2 million dollars was the first deal between Gus and Walter White. It began when Saul arranged a meeting with an unknown purchaser. Walt and his partner Jesse Pinkman arrived at a Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant in the South Valley, and the buyer seemingly never showed. Gus, the restaurant manager, had been silently watching them.

  Walt arranged a second meeting with only Gus that evening. Gus said he was not interested, since Jesse had been late and high and was thus potentially unreliable. Walt promised that Gus would never have to deal with Jesse and that the product would earn enormous returns. Gus agreed, but only if the delivery was made within a limited time at a remote location. Jesse was unconscious after using heroin with his girlfriend Jane Margolis, so Walt had to make the delivery himself. He missed the birth of his daughter Holly. Soon afterward, Gus toured the DEA's Albuquerque field office with other local boosters. There he learned that Walt had lung cancer and that Walt's brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, was a DEA agent.

  Three million dollars was the price Gus put on three months of Walt's time. Pleased with Walt's blue meth, he offered that sum to cook in the hidden superlab under his laundry. Walt refused at first, but Gus convinced him to cook for his family's financial security. Gus supplied Gale Boetticher, the chemist who set up the lab, as Walt's help. Walt then got Gus to bring Jesse back as his assistant.

  Gus told the cartel that once Walt's three months ended, the cartel could kill him. Leonel and Marco Salamanca traveled north, impatient to do it. Gus pointed them instead to Hank, who had actually killed Tuco. He anonymously warned Hank, who killed Marco and critically injured Leonel. Gus used his influence with police to distract them at the hospital so Mike could fatally inject Leonel.

  The crackdown on the cartel after the attempt on Hank killed Juan Bolsa. Realizing his life was at stake, Walt agreed to keep cooking for an extended period for $15 million. Gus privately told Gale to learn all of Walt's methods so he could replace him. Walt understood what that meant. He had Jesse find Gale's apartment, then used Mike's presence at the lab to persuade Jesse to kill Gale. Jesse shot Gale dead.

  Furious, Gus arrived at the lab. Victor feared for his life because he had been recognized at Gale's apartment. He began cooking meth, which he had learned by guarding Walt and Jesse, to prove his usefulness. Gus sliced open Victor's neck and let him bleed to death in front of them. He then calmly told Walt and Jesse to get back to work. Gus installed security cameras and had Mike and Tyrus watch them.

  Mike suggested driving a wedge between Walt and Jesse. He took Jesse out of the lab for dead drops and arranged for him to foil a planned attack. That raised Jesse's confidence and his sense of loyalty to Mike and Gus. Walt gave Jesse a cigarette with a capsule of ricin hidden inside and told him to poison Gus. Jesse did not follow through.

  At Don Eladio's house in Mexico, Gus took Mike and Jesse to a party meant to celebrate a truce. Jesse had cooked a superior batch of meth, and Gus offered to have him stay and work for the cartel. It was a ruse. Gus tricked Eladio and most of the other cartel leaders into drinking from a poisoned bottle of tequila. He took the first drink to allay suspicion and forced himself to vomit afterward. Jesse helped the ill Gus and the wounded Mike escape, killing Hector's last known living grandson, Joaquin Salamanca, in the process. Gus told Hector back in Albuquerque that the cartel leaders were dead and that the Salamanca line ended with him.

  With the DEA beginning to link Gale's death to Gus, Gus fired Walt and began planning to kill Hank. He threatened to kill Walt's family if Walt retaliated. Walt poisoned Andrea's son Brock and convinced Jesse that Gus was responsible. A pipe bomb on Gus's car failed when Gus sensed something amiss and walked away. Walt then persuaded Hector, with a promise of final revenge, to pretend to be a DEA informant. Hector allowed the bomb to be strapped under his wheelchair.

  Gus visited Hector at the nursing home and prepared to kill him with a lethal injection. Hector began ringing the bell on his wheelchair, which set off the bomb. It killed Hector and Tyrus. Gus walked out unharmed at first, until the camera revealed that the blast had torn off the right side of his face. He adjusted his tie and collapsed, dead. Esposito saw the gesture as a man going back to "what they've always done... to be complete in his leaving this world".

  The aftermath reached the restaurants and the burned superlab. Walt, Jesse and Mike used an electromagnet outside the police station to destroy Gus's laptop in the evidence room, since its camera recordings could incriminate them. Police still seized the offshore accounts Gus had set up to pay his employees for their silence. Mike kept paying them from his share of a new meth business, until police interdicted the payments. When Mike refused to give Walt the employees' names, Walt killed him. He got the names from Lydia Rodarte-Quayle and had Gus's former employees killed in prison, ending Gus's drug distribution empire.

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• 8. Reception And Legacy

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  Three nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series are among Esposito's honors for playing Gus. He also won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, at the 3rd Critics' Choice Television Awards. Paste ranked Gus number 3 in its list of the 20 Best Characters of 2011. TV Guide named him in its 2013 list of The 60 Nastiest Villains of All Time. In 2016, Rolling Stone placed him on its "40 Greatest TV Villains of All Time". His depiction as a gay man has also drawn praise, as an example of a compelling antagonist driven by his sexuality.

  The idea of bringing him back had been around for years. His popularity and his importance to the series left room for "flashback" appearances. That did not happen until 2017, when Gus returned in the third season of Better Call Saul. When Gilligan conceived the story for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, he considered including Gus. He decided against it, feeling the film should focus only on the most important characters in Jesse Pinkman's life, and Gus was not one of them.

  AMC found another use for him during season three of Better Call Saul. It released ten short videos on YouTube and its social media accounts, titled Los Pollos Hermanos Employee Training with Gus Fring. They combined live-action shots of Esposito as Gus with animated segments, presented as training videos for the restaurant's workers. The series won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series in 2017.

  Not every reaction was praise. Some native Spanish speakers have criticized Esposito for an allegedly stilted and unnatural accent when speaking Spanish. A 2014 NPR article about representations of Spanish and Spanglish in American television singled out Gus. One fan said he was "so painful to listen to". The same fan was angry that "such a pivotal and fantastic character would have such a giant, noticeable, nails-on-a-chalkboard flaw."

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