There have been plenty of scary bad guys in the four seasons of “Fargo,” Noah Hawley’s masterful crime anthology series on the FX channel.
But none, not even Billy Bob Thornton’s creatively ruthless hit man in season one, has been more chilling than season four’s Gaetano Fadda, a mobster played by the remarkable 34-year-old Italian actor Salvatore Esposito in his English-language debut.
Words like “hulking” and “imposing” don’t really capture the aura of implacable menace generated by Esposito’s Gaetano. Like Luca Brasi from “The Godfather,’' Gaetano is a killing machine, seemingly unstoppable and impervious to fear or pain. Even when he’s captured and roughed up, Gaetano is so scornfully defiant of his captors that he threatens them.
Esposito first caught my attention when he pulled off an impressive physical and character transformation in “Gomorrah,” an ink-dark drama (now available on HBO Max) that is set in Naples in the 2010s. “Gomorrah” is about the fierce power struggles within and between criminal organizations, and that same dynamic is at play, albeit in a very different time and place, in the fourth season of “Fargo” (now streaming, along with the first three seasons, on Hulu).
Two organized crime syndicates — one Black and headed by Loy Cannon (Chris Rock), one Italian-American and headed by Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman) — are locked in a bloody fight for control of Kansas City in 1950. Within that wider battle an internal struggle is being waged as Gaetano, newly arrived from Italy, begins to openly challenge and even belittle his older brother Josto, clearly intent on usurping him as leader of the family.
Yet Esposito’s Gaetano can also be a regular geyser of sentimentality and over-the-top affection for his brother — that is, when he’s not trying to intimidate him and everybody else.
In some ways, Esposito’s Gaetano blends elements of the actor’s portrayal in “Gomorrah’' of Gennaro (Genny) Savastano, the son of a powerful mob boss. Genny is chubby-cheeked and gregarious and lives to party in season one, and is seen as something of a joke by the other young gangsters. By season two, however, Esposito’s body is planed to a steel-sharp edge, Genny has morphed into a figure of ice-cold brutality, and no one is laughing anymore.
It’s notable that in a recent interview with the website Collider, Esposito likened Gaetano to “a raging bull,’' and listed Robert De Niro among the actors he admires. The physical metamorphosis De Niro underwent to play boxer Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull’' is, of course, the stuff of movie legend.
Esposito’s transformations in “Gomorrah’' and “Fargo’' (for which he gained more than 20 pounds) do not equal that of De Niro’s in “Raging Bull,’' and a De Niro-like career would certainly be hard to match. But at a minimum Esposito has established himself as an actor with very few peers today when it comes to creating characters who exude a sense of danger so palpable you can feel it even from the safety of your couch.
Don Aucoin can be reached at donald.aucoin@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeAucoin.