- “This is what comes of blood for blood, Hector. Sangre por sangre.”
- — Gus Fring to Hector Salamanca, Breaking Bad episode, “Hermanos”
Gus Fring is a gay character from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
Biography[]
Gustavo "Gus" Fring, also referred to as the Chicken Man and the Chilean, is a Chilean-American restaurant entrepreneur that uses his stores as a front for the drug trade. He is the proprietor of Los Pollos Hermanos , a highly successful fried chicken restaurant chain.
Appearance[]
Gus is a black man with short, shaved hair with greying streaks. He is 5’7. He is usually wearing his various business suits or sweaters. He also wears his trademark Los Pollos Hermanos uniform a fair amount of time. Gus always puts care into his appearance, as he despises unkemptness.
Personality[]
Gus is an expert at walking the line between the friendly and low-key exterior, and ruthless and machiavellian self in managing his vast drug empire. He takes an active role in managing his front businesses and personally supervises employees and serves customers at his Los Pollos Hermanos restaurants. Quiet and humble, he is incredibly cautious about with whom he does business and keeps a very healthy distance from the product he sells in order to appear almost invisible.
Keeping the entire operation under his icy control, Gus admires professionalism and caution in his colleagues, and is generally calm and calculated. He employs a number of enforcers and has personally killed rivals and associates, making him a dangerous, cold-blooded murderer. In interviews, Giancarlo Esposito said he made the choice to make Gus "graceful." He described him as "someone who is poised to take over the cartel, someone who is poised to manipulate other people into doing what he needs them to do." Gustavo doesn't trust anyone who isn't as cautious as he is, as they are too unpredictable, and he prides himself on being several steps ahead at all times. Gus is thus mainly controlled, cold, powerful, and menacing.
However, Gus has been shown to genuinely care about people, noticeably Max Arciniega, whom he loved dearly, dedicating nearly twenty years of his life to avenge his murder, which was at the hands of the Juárez Cartel. The loss of Max is partially what turned Gus into a ruthless villain, who is not above anything when it comes to avenging Max's death, including the murder of children (like Tomas Cantillo) and the gradual killing of Hector Salamanca's entire family. However, his dedication to avenging Max's death would ultimately be Gustavo's one and ultimate weakness which would lead to his own violent demise and the destruction of his drug empire.
Gus has shown to possess an obsessive-compulsive disorder, in this case that would be his tendency to have everything perfectly clean and controlled by himself. Gus does not tolerate when something is not going as he planned it to be. His obsession with cleanliness is probably due to his childhood, which was strongly marked by poverty.
Gus is also a man of honor as he reimburses any damages done to the property of his employees such as their cars when performing duties he requires them to. While having no problem killing someone, Gus seems to not enjoy doing it and only enjoy killing people that did something to him, like his greatest enemy, Hector Salamanca.
Sexuality[]
Gus’s sexuality has long been debated in the Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul franchise. Ever since the “Hermanos” episode, released in 2011, fans have speculated that the relationship between Gus and Max was homosexual. Though it was heavily implied throughout the years, official word was never made, until in 2022, Peter Gould (showrunner and writer) confirmed that Max was indeed Gus’s boyfriend on the Ringer podcast The Watch. Gus’s sexuality isn’t officially given a label, but he is heavily hinted to be in fact homosexual, as his only attractions shown in the series were men, the two being Max and David, and has never shown interest in the opposite gender.
Relationships[]
Max Arciniega[]
Gus met and fell in love with a gifted chemist, Max, sometime during his early years in Chile. The two became extremely close and eventually became boyfriends. Gus financed Max’s education in Chemistry, and the pair later moved to Mexico to start their own restaurant chain, Los Pollos Hermanos. During this time, Gus and Max began giving out samples of Max’s methamphetamine product to attract the attention of the Juárez cartel, in hopes of working with them for mutual profit. But, in 1989, during the meeting with the leaders of said Cartel, Max was murdered by Hector Salamanca, ordered by Don Eladio Vuente to send a message to Gus. Since that day, Gustavo vowed revenge against the Juárez cartel, and thus would stop at nothing to avenge his deceased lover.
David[]
Gustavo occasionally visited a trendy bar to drink wine, who working there was a Sommelier named David. He and David seemed to talk whenever Gustavo came to the bar, and was well-acquainted with him. In the episode “Fun and Games”, the two men exchanged anecdotes related to wine. David recollected a past experience visiting French wine country, while Gus recalled purchasing a vintage which David recommended that same night over a year earlier. The conversation seemed to have romantic undertones, with Gus seemingly interested in David. After David momentarily left to grab a wine bottle to show Gus, Gus appeared to realize that he is getting too attached to David, and that he could not bring himself to get close to someone again, let alone having that kind of person in his life interfere with his line of work. Gus then left the bar early that night before David could return with the wine.
Tropes[]
See Also[]
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| GAY | Gus Fring |
| QUEER | Max Arciniega |