Giancarlo Esposito and John Turturro spent much of Do the Right Thing genuinely unable to stand each other, and now they can't make it through the scene where they face off without breaking down in tears. The two actors, who played Buggin' Out and Pino in Spike Lee's 1989 Brooklyn drama, have been revisiting the film together decades after shooting it, and what started as an off-screen cold war has turned into the kind of emotional unraveling you usually only see at a reunion special.
As Esposito tells it, the hostility was real from the very first day of production. Neither actor had much use for the other, and they carried that friction straight onto the set. "We didn't like each other at all," Esposito said of those early days. The dislike wasn't a bit or an acting exercise. It was just two proud performers rubbing each other the wrong way while Lee filmed a movie about a neighborhood coming apart at the seams.
That's part of why the clash between Buggin' Out and Pino lands so hard on screen. Buggin' Out is the Bed-Stuy local who takes one look at Sal's Wall of Fame - a photo display honoring only Italian-American actors - and decides it's an insult in a Black neighborhood. Pino is Sal's son, defensive of his father and quick to sneer at the customers he clearly resents. When the two characters go at each other, you're watching two men who genuinely couldn't agree on the color of the sky.
What neither actor could have predicted is that the same hostility would eventually curdle into something else. Esposito describes a turning point on set, a moment when he and Turturro finally saw each other clearly. The standoff gave way to a shared understanding that they were both doing difficult, exposed work in service of a director who demanded everything. "When he finally looked at me, I saw him," Esposito recalled. "There was a tear in his eye, and there was a tear in mine."
That memory has stuck with him, and these days it's the scene itself that undoes them. When the pair revisit the pizzeria confrontation, the old antagonism is gone and something rawer has taken its place. They cry mid-scene now - not as a performance choice, but because the years between then and now have charged every line with a different meaning.
For anyone who hasn't seen the film in a while, the setup remains deceptively simple. Sal runs a pizzeria in Brooklyn, and his Wall of Fame becomes a flashpoint when Buggin' Out argues that a pizzeria in a Black neighborhood ought to celebrate Black actors - an argument Sal refuses to hear. What starts as a dispute over a wall of photographs grows into a symbol of racism and resentment for Buggin' Out and his neighbors, and the tension builds until the whole block is ready to boil over. Lee directed the film from his own script, and it runs 120 minutes, released on June 14, 1989.
The cast reads now like a murderers' row of talent: Danny Aiello as Sal, Ossie Davis as Da Mayor, Ruby Dee as Mother Sister, Richard Edson as Vito, Lee himself as Mookie, Bill Nunn as Radio Raheem, Esposito as Buggin' Out, and Turturro as Pino. The film remains a critical touchstone, holding a 7.777 rating on TMDb and a permanent place in the conversation about American cinema.
But the story here isn't the rating or the anniversary. It's the strange alchemy of two actors who couldn't stand the sight of each other discovering, years later, that the friction they resented was the foundation of some of the best work either of them ever did. Esposito puts it plainly: what felt like a curse during production now feels like a gift. The tears aren't regret. They're recognition.
And there's something fitting about that for a movie built entirely on the idea that people who live side by side can hate each other and still be bound together. Sal and Pino versus Buggin' Out was never a simple fight, and neither was Esposito versus Turturro. Time has a way of revealing what a shouting match was actually about all along - and sometimes, it turns out, the answer is respect.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
