Pajiba 10 FYC: Raul Esparza

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | December 10, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | December 10, 2023 |

I’ve been part of Team Pajiba for about six and a half years now, and I’ve offered a lot of fine figures for your consideration in the Pajiba 10 vote. There’s one I’ve wanted to do since the beginning of my tenure, but I’ve put it off because it didn’t seem current enough for the zeitgeist of hotness. There were always new internet boyfriends to adopt, hotter and more relevant babes vying for our ceaseless attention. Well, now I finally have a good excuse to pitch my long-desired celebrity crush. Thank you, FX and A Murder at the End of the World.

Raul Esparza has dominated my mind as a fine looking mother*cker since my teen years when I was obsessed with Pushing Daisies and got mad that Olive kept ignoring the adorable homeopathic salesman at the Pie Hole who clearly adored her far more than the admittedly perfect Lee Pace. After that, he kept popping up in various places, most notably Hannibal and way too many seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. And, of course, I discovered the most prominent part of his career: Broadway. Esparza has been nominated for four Tonys (and hasn’t won one, but even for Company, which is the Broadway nerd version of being furious that Crash beat Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars.)

This guy can SING. And he can sing ANYTHING. ‘Defying Gravity’? ‘Time Warp’? Sondheim deep cuts? ‘Babalu’? He can do it. Theatre kids don’t get celebrated for raw sex appeal very often but this dude has it in spades, even when he’s belting out patter songs from Merrily We Roll Along. A bisexual musical star who f*cks? What more could you possibly ask for?

Listening to Esparza sing is nothing short of seismic. If you can listen to him sing ‘Being Alive’ and wholly own one of Sondheim’s best songs and not start sobbing midway through then you might be dead. Oh, did Judy Garland’s ‘The Man That Got Away’ not emotionally destroy you enough? My boy’s got you covered. Also, he was so good in The Rocky Horror Show that Richard O’Brien said he was the best Riff Raff ever. He’s got range! Also, I just found out that he’s going to be the lead in a musical about Galileo, and you just know that’s going to sex up science to the max (can someone pay to send me to this show? For work purposes?)

Esparza is hot. Like, objectively, this is just a ridiculously good-looking guy with a side profile you’d kill for and the ability to fill out a suit like nobody’s business. He’s so gosh-darn hot that he made Fannibals squee over Frederick Chilton, which is a little like getting turned on by stepping on Lego bricks, and I respected them entirely for it (but oh wow terrible things happen to his poor face on that show. If we’d ever gotten season four, he would have ended up a head in a jar like a Futurama guest star.) On SVU, he brought some much-needed sass to a never-ending series and modelled season after season of suit porn. If there was any justice in the world, he would have played Desi Arnaz in that terrible Lucille Ball that Aaron Sorkin made (and it would have been written by someone else, but that’s a different rant altogether.)

Pajiba 10 is a celebration of hotness, not just pure aesthetics but the whole package. It’s also an opportunity for us to go off the well-trodden path and explore the internet boyfriends and total babes who don’t get endless daddy memes made about them. Alas, Raul Esparza hasn’t gotten a ton of leading roles in films, and he is still Tony-less, but that only makes him more deserving of your precious vote. Let’s give it up for the theatre kid who survived Hannibal Lecter (mostly) and brought sex appeal to SVU in a way that even Chris Meloni struggled to keep up with. Just take a few hours out of your day - you can spare it - and enjoy those dulcet tones. Other daddies can be put aside this year. Have a little Cuban instead…