‘The Gentlemen’ Star Giancarlo Esposito Takes Venice’s Criminal Underworld to the Page in ‘The Venetian’

Giancarlo Esposito has spent much of his career playing men who run criminal empires with unnerving calm, and now he is building one on the page. The actor is a co-creator of ‘The Venetian’, a neo-noir graphic novel published through Gallery 13, the Simon & Schuster imprint.

It is a notable swerve for a performer best known for screen work. Esposito became a household name as Gus Fring in ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul’, then carried that icy menace into ‘The Mandalorian’ as Moff Gideon and into ‘The Boys’. He has collected six Emmy nominations along the way, and more recently he played the sophisticated boss of a meth empire in ‘The Gentlemen’. A book about Venice’s crime families fits neatly into that run, even if the medium is new to him.

The story follows a retired assassin who returns to Venice’s criminal underground after the son he abandoned years ago is kidnapped. According to the publisher’s description, he is Matteo Moro, a legendary killer who vanished after one final job 17 years ago. He left behind the woman he loved and their unborn son, hoping to shield them from the violence that had consumed his own family.

To the criminal world, Moro is a dead man. Forced out of exile, he heads back to a Venice of shadowed canals, crumbling palazzos and old enemies who never forgot his name. The publisher pitches the book as a cinematic story of family, sacrifice and revenge, and as an action-packed thriller about fathers and sons, the sins people inherit and the terrible price of coming home.

That framing says a lot about where the material is aimed. Plenty of hitman stories hinge on one last job, but this one is built around a failure of fatherhood, which gives a character like Moro something more personal to lose than his own skin. It is also easy to imagine Esposito’s trademark stillness and quiet authority translating to a man who has spent nearly two decades pretending to be dead.

Esposito did not make it alone. Screenwriter Matt Wheeler and writer and storyboard artist Jay Martin share the co-creator credit. Wheeler, a Cambridge graduate who worked as a copywriter in London before moving into screenwriting and earning an MFA at UCLA, is also working with Esposito on the six-part AMC crime thriller ‘Parish’, where he is a co-executive producer.

Martin already has a graphic novel to his name. He wrote and illustrated ‘Lost Boy’, published by Dark Horse Comics in 2023, which gives the project an artist with real experience in the format. He described the setting as a modern noir in the decaying Venetian underbelly, with Esposito’s protagonist at its center, a pitch that suits a story about guilt, blood ties and a city that is slowly falling apart.

The project was first announced in March 2024, when Esposito told Deadline it was “an unusual original story that exemplifies my deeply rich Afro Italian heritage.” That detail matters, because it positions the book as something personal rather than a celebrity side project with a famous name on the cover.

Esposito has also made clear that the graphic novel is not necessarily the end of the road. During a December 2025 appearance at the Red Sea International Film Festival, he said he had been developing the story as a graphic novel with the intention of turning it into a film. Coverage of that interview adds that he was eager to make more feature moves after a long run of television work, and that a plan to adapt the book for the screen was already in place.

That path is a familiar one in Hollywood, where comics and graphic novels often serve as a proving ground before a studio commits to a movie. Having a storyboard artist among the creators could help here, since Martin’s visual approach to the pages may double as a blueprint for how the film looks. Whether Esposito would also star is unconfirmed, and nothing about casting or a studio has been announced.

Retail listings give the hardcover an on-sale date of June 29, 2027, with a page count of 208 and a trim of roughly 10 inches by 6 inches. Some retailers are already taking preorders. Those details come from storefront listings rather than a publisher announcement, so the date could still move as the book gets closer to shelves.

For now, the premise, the creative team and the publisher are the firm pieces of the picture. Esposito has built a reputation on playing patient, dangerous men whose composure hides something volatile, and a retired assassin dragged back to a city that wants him dead looks like a natural home for that energy. If the finished pages deliver on the pitch, ‘The Venetian’ could give readers a Venice far removed from the postcards.

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