Jennifer Esposito's film Fresh Kills brings a new perspective to the mafia genre
Esposito’s directorial debut draws on her own experiences growing up around organized crime
When Jennifer Esposito was growing up on Staten Island, N.Y., it felt normal for her to see organized crime and violence in her neighbourhood.
"I left and I realized that wasn't normal," she tells guest host Talia Schlanger in a Q interview. "People weren't as violent — especially the young women. That's what I held on to: the rage of the young women."
Esposito is a TV and film actor who got her breakout role in Spike Lee's 1999 crime thriller, Summer of Sam. Now, she's made her directorial debut with Fresh Kills, a female-centred mob drama that focuses on the wives and daughters behind the men in a mafia family.
Unlike other films in the mafia genre, Fresh Kills skips the mob clichés to bring forward a unique story about the family ties that shape us. Set on Staten Island, the film follows the two daughters of the Larusso family, Rose and Connie, as they deal with their mafia boss father going to prison.
While Esposito says her family life wasn't like Rose and Connie's, she could relate to the general feeling of powerlessness that comes from being a woman navigating a man's world.
"The rage that I saw in them started to feel like my own," she says. "It wasn't in the same circumstance, but I realized that the rage that they were expressing was because they were locked in a space. They were born into a spot they didn't choose. And that is something that I felt."
Esposito says the reason she pushed to get Fresh Kills made in the first place was because she was looking for more "challenging work" as an actor and not seeing very many opportunities for women.
"It was very important for me to stop complaining about what I was seeing and what I was getting and do something about it," she tells Schlanger. "You're part of the problem if you're not doing anything about it. So this is why I took this leap."
The full interview with Jennifer Esposito is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Jennifer Esposito produced by Vanessa Nigro.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
