Mark Margolis, Actor on ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul,’ Dies at 83
He received an Emmy nom for portraying Hector Salamanca on those shows and appeared in 'Scarface,' 'Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,' 'Oz' and six Darren Aronofsky movies.
Mark Margolis in 2014
MIKE PONT/FILMMAGICMark Margolis, the journeyman actor who turned in a commanding performance as the vindictive drug runner Hector Salamanca, a man of few words and a bell, on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, has died. He was 83.
Margolis died Thursday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City following a short illness, his son, actor and Knitting Factory Entertainment CEO Morgan Margolis, announced.
A protégé of Stella Adler who did double duty as the legendary acting teacher’s personal assistant, Margolis also stood out as the Bolivian henchman Alberto the Shadow in Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983); as the gravelly voiced landlord Mr. Shickadance looking for the rent in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994); and, from 1998-2003, as the HIV-infected mob boss Antonio Nappa on HBO’s Oz.
The Philadelphia native played an aging math teacher for Darren Aronofsky in Pi (1998), then showed up in the filmmaker’s next five movies: as the guy who keeps selling Mrs. Goldfarb’s (Ellen Burstyn) TV back to her in Requiem for a Dream (2000); as a priest in The Fountain (2006); as Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s (Mickey Rourke) landlord in The Wrestler (2008); as a ballet patron in Black Swan (2010); and as a “fallen angel” in Noah (2014).
Asked by The Hollywood Reporter in a 2012 interview why Aronofsky kept hiring him, he replied with tongue in cheek: “He thinks he has an obligation! I started with him on his first movie, the $60,000 Pi, when he was unknown. I chased him for three months because he kept lying to me about when I’d get my money. I finally threatened to call his mother, who was craft services on the film. Then he finally paid me.”
Margolis, who didn’t speak Spanish, made his first appearance as “Tio” Salamanca on Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad in March 2009 on the second episode of the AMC drama’s second season. A onetime enforcer to Mexican crime boss Don Eladio (Steven Bauer), his character is paralyzed and only able to communicate using facial expressions and a brass service bell fastened to his wheelchair.
In the spectacular season-four finale, “Face Off,” which aired in October 2011, Salamanca gets his revenge on drug kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) as part of a suicide mission, and he received an Emmy nomination for outstanding guest actor in a drama series in 2012. (Hector Salamanca even got his own tribute website.)
Starting in 2016 with the second season of the Breaking Bad prequel Better Called Saul, Margolis got a second chance to play Salamanca as a younger man, before he became incapacitated.
“I was only coming onto Breaking Bad as far as I knew for that one episode, but there’s no accounting for taste, and the fans took a fancy to me,” he said. “Somebody asked me recently, ‘How did you manage to play such a horrible guy?’ and I said, ‘Have you talked to my friends?’ They’ll tell you I’m pretty miserable to begin with.”
Margolis was born into a Jewish family in Philadelphia on Nov. 26, 1939. His mother, Fanya, was a decorator who worked for a wallpaper company and did lots of painting, and his father, Isidore, was a factory worker.
He took his first acting class at 14, and after a year at Temple University, he moved to New York and studied drama with Adler at The Actors Studio (he would become a lifetime member). “My first impression of her was, ‘If God is a woman, this is him,'” he told Eric Broadbent in an Inside the Gilliverse interview in 2020. “She was larger than life. Everything that I know [about acting] came from Stella.”
In exchange for classes, he served as Adler’s personal assistant for nearly three years, getting her cabs, carrying her groceries back to her apartment opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art and checking coats for guests when she hosted a party.
“I had a real fixation with her,” he told The Observer in 2012. “I was 19 years old and she was 60. That’s what a turn-on she was.”
Margolis later studied with Alder’s rival, Lee Strasberg, for about a year but drifted away from acting and had trouble making ends meet. He managed a coffee house on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village — “I used to let Richie Havens sit there all night even though he didn’t have any money because I loved listening to his music,” he said in 2016 — built theatrical artwork installations and took geodesic domes to colleges all around the country.
