Credit: Far Out / Juan Azulay / Universal Pictures

Scott Campbell

Wed 15 July 2026 11:58, UK

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If you’ve been even a semi-regular viewer of movies and TV shows over the last three decades, then there’s a high probability that you’ve seen Maurice Compte at least once.

On the off-chance that you haven’t, then it stands to reason that you will very soon, with the actor’s next appearance coming in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which arrives in cinemas on July 17th. As you might expect, though, the specifics of his involvement are being kept under lock and key.

Since the two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker loves few things more than shrouding his films in a veil of secrecy, even when it’s based on one of the oldest and most well-known tales in human history, Compte isn’t at liberty to divulge too many specifics, but he can say enough to whet the appetite.

The star, who counts David Ayer’s End of Watch and Sabotage, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the Liam Neeson-led A Walk Among the Tombstones among his big-screen credits, has also developed a habit of appearing in some of the biggest and most zeitgeisty shows of the 21st century.

That includes, but isn’t limited to, the likes of 24, Breaking Bad, Southland, Narcos, and the Sons of Anarchy spinoff Mayans MC, but in terms of scope, scale, and spectacle, The Odyssey is the biggest yet, and Compte fully agrees with Far Out‘s assessment that it might be the single most hotly-anticipated release of 2026, no small feat when Dune 3, Spider-Man, and the Avengers are waiting in the wings.

“I say the most anticipated movie in centuries, right?” the actor offered. “It was Homer’s poem, now getting redone by Chris Nolan. I think, if Homer knew who was doing his film, he’d be proud.” No pressure on the Oppenheimer architect, then, and getting the chance to share a set and be directed by Nolan was an opportunity Compte soaked up every second of.

“One of my deep desires had always been to work with him, be on set with him, be a fly on the wall,” he explained. “All of it has been a fantastic learning curve. I’ve seen, I think, all of his films, even before I knew that I was going to be doing The Odyssey,” and he was thrilled to be around a master of their craft.

“I would stand on the side, and I don’t think I was the only one, I think there were a few of us who were really sort of silent cheerleaders for him,” Compte continued. “I think I went the extra step to try to maybe take a sniff and see what kind of cologne he wore, or what kind of socks he had on, or what exact haircut he had, so that I could emulate it at some point.”

He’s kidding, we think, but it can’t be ruled out that the actor was being deadly serious. After all, Memento‘s Joe Pantoliano once admitted to disguising himself as Nolan to escape the attention of Sopranos fans when he was out and about, so the man clearly inspires feverish devotion in his cast.

“He is so accessible, and he is such an easy-going person, to be honest, that when you’re on set with him, if you didn’t know who Chris Nolan was, you wouldn’t feel like you’re in any different type of a movie set,” the star went on. “It’s a very welcoming atmosphere. Everyone is obviously very joyous to be there, and he’s at the centre of it all. But you really wouldn’t know by looking that he is the man deferred to.”

Compte pointed to Nolan’s wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, and his recurring director of photography, Hoyte van Hoytema, as the three tips of the spear, to continue the Odyssey theme. “You can tell it’s that trio,” he said of the harmonious atmosphere on set, even if one of them is firmly in charge.

It’s shaping up to be a big summer for the 30-year veteran of the business, who was most recently seen in the hit streaming series, MIA, the latest from Ozark creator Bill Dubuque. The crime thriller wrapped up its nine-episode first season in May, on a cliffhanger, no less, but when we spoke to Compte, an official renewal hadn’t yet been issued, leading him to compare the waiting game to a hand of poker.

“It’s like having two aces and being in the fourth card, and you’re just waiting for that fifth card to drop, so that you know you won the hand,” he metaphorically mused. “You got the best hand, you’re happy with what you have, you’re happy with what you did, you’re happy with the group, and you just have to let it go, you have to just turn it over to whatever is out there, and just let it do its own magic.”

“The same magic that got you there is the one that’s going to keep you going,” Compte suggested. “So, you’ve got to surrender at some point.” That’s one way of looking at it, especially when it’s up in the air as to whether or not his fearsome cartel figure, Mateo Rojas, will be back on our screens, but he seems to be a man who always has at least a couple of creative irons in the fire.

One of them was Hotel Cocaine, the semi-fictionalised 2024 crime drama that revolved around the Mutiny Hotel in Miami, which became a cocaine-fuelled hub in the 1970s and 1980s, gaining fame and notoriety as a place where everyone from Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin to federal agents and cocaine kingpins could be found, as well as the inspiration behind Scarface’s Babylon Club.

Compte doesn’t play a role in the series, but he was instrumental to its creation and development, as well as serving as a co-executive producer. Why? Because the show’s protagonist, played by Danny Pino, is Cuban exile, undercover CIA operative, and general manager of the Mutiny, Roman Compte: his father.

The seed was planted by a conversation he had with Narcos co-creator Chris Brancato, which eventually snowballed into a show of its own. “It’s an homage to my dad,” Compte surmised. “Anytime that you get to put your parents’ journeys, especially as immigrants… It’s every Latin person’s journey, it’s every immigrant’s journey into a new world and finding your place there, finding who you are, and belonging to something.”

Having known Brancato for over a decade, Compte “knew he wasn’t joking” about the project, but it still required plenty of introspection and courage. “As an actor, I second-guessed myself, and it took me a few years to really work up the courage to be able to start to write a bit about my dad’s story,” he admitted. “It was a very healing process to do, and then I didn’t want to show it to him.”

Fortunately, a phone call quickly broke down that resistance, and Hotel Cocaine was finally off to the races.

“The things that are meant to be come easy,” Compte philosophically added. “The things that you know are right, they always feel like there’s something happening that is beyond you that makes it seem completely easy, and that’s really what happened, whether it was The Odyssey, MIA, or Hotel Cocaine.”

Despite being an actor by trade, Compte doesn’t play an onscreen role in Hotel Cocaine, and his partner even suggested that he play the lead. “She’s like, ‘Why don’t you play your dad?'” he recalled. “I said, ‘I would rather see this thing play out and have a say in it.'” Keeping a distance meant that he could maintain his investment without compromising the creative vision, because he felt it would be “for my own benefit” rather than the show at large.

“If I was the lead actor, they treat you a bit with kid gloves,” he pointed out. “They want to keep you in a way that you’re not so involved in the story that it detracts from your performance, and I don’t think I would have been privy to some of the information, which for me, allowed me to learn a lot about the way that the industry works.”

As mentioned, Compte is a 30-year veteran of Hollywood, but it’s only recently that he’s been making moves into producing, whether he’s appearing on-camera or not. He starred in Danny Trejo’s American Sicario and Olga Kurylenko’s Dominique, but he didn’t feature in the horror comedy Don’t Suck or the action comedy sequel The Wrath of Becky, all of which he executive-produced.

He also produced the music videos for The Cult’s 2022 singles ‘Mirror’ and ‘Give Me Mercy’, so it stands to reason that it’s something he’s becoming more focused on as his career progresses. It absolutely is, but the way Compte phrases it took us by surprise. “Hilarious question,” he replied.

“When you come up in this business as an actor, you get a call on a Tuesday that you’re going to be travelling on Thursday for three months to Morocco to go film something, and you’re instantly hit with the excitement of it, and you’re planning, and you’re reading,” he proffered, setting the stage.

“And when you’re developing something as a producer, you get an idea that then you’ve then got to find another friend to write it with, and by the time you actually arrive at the place, you are so exhausted, you’ve spent so much of yourself, you just want to see the thing done,” he concluded, balancing the scales.

Compte confessed that he’s “almost envious” of the excitement the actors show when he’s wearing two hats. “Meanwhile, we started this thing three years ago, it took us three years to get it off the ground, but it’s the whole timeline,” making it clear where his priorities lie.

As for the acting, it wasn’t something he’d grown up dreaming of, and he almost fell into it by accident. When we ask if he could have ever imagined himself celebrating his 30th anniversary as a professional actor with a Christopher Nolan movie, a hit TV show, the answer was as you’d expect.

“My world was essentially ending,” Compte reflected. “The grandmother who raised me was done, and I had zero direction. I was going to join the Marines, and I needed a credit to graduate high school, and the only thing that was open, because I needed a fine art credit to graduate, was acting, and I took acting because it was the only thing that was open, because I waited so long to register, because I really wasn’t a very studious person.”

It was a last-minute decision made out of necessity, but “the way that it turned my life around, the way that I met a mentor there, the things that unfolded, the ease by which everything came, the healing of getting on stage and being able to portray another person that I could use as crutch to bring out some of the emotion that I had trouble expressing” was, and it’s probably understating things, life-changing in every way.

Compte had grown up feeling disconnected, suffering from a “big sense of not feeling that I belonged” until he discovered acting, at which point he found his calling. Or, as he put it, his calling found him: “I truly feel more than me discovering it, I was discovered by it, because I was using it as a means to an end to graduate and go join the Marines and go fight somewhere.” Three decades later, and that “sense of connection” he feels to performing remains as strong as ever.

It’s a whole different ballgame from when he first started, though, thanks to streaming. It’s completely changed the game, and while there are so many more options available than there were ten, 15, or 20 years ago when Compte was still trying to make a name for himself, there are a couple of drawbacks, too.

“I’ll start with the negative, so that we can end up on a positive note,” he began. “When you have more streamers and you have more outlets, then the money becomes a bit less. So, I think for a lot of people, it becomes less about quality than it does volume. Where you used to be able to live for a year off of one paycheque that you did from a job, now you need several jobs, and so you’re worried more about how to make the money to be able to maintain the lifestyle that you built for yourself.”

As for the positive, which sadly doesn’t apply to all actors, especially up-and-comers, Compte is a known quantity. He moved to Hollywood when he was starting out and “had a journey and a place to go,” but these days, auditions are increasingly taped or held online, which he believes “causes a lot of anxiety for people.”

“The idea that I came into this business very early on, and people now know who I am, it just makes the work easier for me, because I don’t need to audition with the same group of young people coming in,” he pondered. “People already know who I am, and I get called into things that most people wouldn’t, like The Odyssey.” It still took him years of hard work, but Narcos became a turning point in and of itself.

Even though Compte had been working for almost 20 years at that point, being cast in what was his longest recurring role in terms of episode count as Horacio Carrillo, one of the main characters in one of the most-watched shows on the biggest streaming service that was nominated for ‘Best Drama Series’ at the Golden Globes, opened a few doors that had been shut until then.

Little did he know at the time, but the part was basically his from the start. “When I auditioned for that, I had also auditioned for Westworld at the same time, and I was up for both of them, and I got a call one day at my house, and it was, I answered, I said, ‘Hello’, and it was like, ‘Hey, Maurice, it’s Chris Brancato, you remember me?'”

“I said, ‘Yeah, you told me you were going to find me one day, and you were going to put me in something huge,'” Compte remembered. “And he goes, ‘Well, I’m the showrunner and the exec on the show, and I saw your audition. How would you like to play Carrillo?’ I said, ‘Are you serious?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, if you say yes right now, you don’t have to do anything else; the role is yours.'”

Obviously, the actor was ready to seize it with both hands, until Brancato ended the phone call by saying, “I’m on my way to Colombia, and I’m gonna call you in a few weeks.” That was without an official confirmation that he’d landed the Narcos gig, which almost plunged Compte into a pit of existential despair, until the deal was sealed a few days later, not a few weeks, and he was the show’s Carrillo.

“It was life-changing,” he acknowledged. “I got to meet some amazing people, and the main thing that came out of it, other than the work, was my relationship with Chris.” It turned out to be the gift that kept on giving, too, with a certain two-time Academy Award-winning auteur and heavyweight of modern cinema reaching out to offer Compte a role based on their fandom of the series.

“Quentin Tarantino, he had seen Narcos, and he asked me to come in to audition for something,” with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood holding casting calls. “He told me how much he loved my role, and he goes, ‘By the way, Maurice, I want to offer you a role, but I want you to read it first because it’s kind of a small role, but I like you, and I think that you…'”

At that point, Compte cut him off. “I said, ‘Hold on, Quentin, hold on a second,'” he smiled. “I said, ‘Listen, I love what you do, and if you were doing a baseball movie and you needed a guy in the stands to yell ‘Hot dogs!’ and sell hot dogs for you, I’m your guy’. And he laughed, and he goes, ‘The role is yours, you got it, it’s done.'” With that, he was cast as one of the ‘Land Pirates’ in the Bounty Law sequence of Tarantino’s most recent picture.

As for how he separates the wheat from the chaff when deciding on his next role, “energy” is the word that comes up most often, with Compte comparing the best experiences on set to a symphony: “It’s an orchestra feeling,” he outlined. “You’re part of something bigger than yourself.”

Another concern are his children, mostly because they aren’t old enough to watch most of his filmography. “I thought it might be fun to do kids’ movies,” Compte mused. “Maybe do a buddy film with a dog or a monkey.” Not a bad idea, especially when he regales Far Out with the conversations that have unfolded at home.

“My kids want to watch MIA, and I’m like, ‘Absolutely not’. They’re like, ‘What about Narcos?’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely not’. They’re like, ‘What about Breaking Bad?’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely not.'” Maybe one day, but for the time being, since his kids “love those movies with, like, the dog that gets lost and the guy that goes looking for him,” he’s open to any offers. “For them,” he concluded. “I would maybe do one.”

For Compte, it’s all about the feeling. As a result, he prefers not to know too much about his potential collaborators, sharing that he’d “rather not know who the director is, I’d rather not know how famous this guy is, or the amazing stuff he’s done until after,” which left him feeling somewhat embarrassed when he worked with venerated artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel on his Academy Award-nominated Reinaldo Arenas biopic, Before Night Falls, at the turn of the millennium.

“I didn’t know who he was, and they were like, ‘Yeah, he’s a painter’, and I was like, ‘Guys, don’t tell me,'” Even then, he was still unprepared. “I get invited to his house, and he opens his door, and his art studio has a story taken out because he has a six-story house, and he took out every other story, so when I get in, I see an art piece that goes from the second floor to the fourth floor. I walked in, and I almost fainted, because I looked, and I said, ‘This man is massive.'”

When he confessed that he had no idea who Schnabel was, he laughed and replied, “Yeah, I figured,” which worked in his favour. “That’s how I got that film,” Compte reflected. ” I think that when things are aligned internally for me, the external world has a way of mirroring that for me in a way that’s magical, so the magic has to happen inside of me, and then the Julian Schnabels and the Quentin Tarantinos and the Chris Nolans of the world show up.”

As we’ve discussed, the 30-year veteran has racked up an impressive and eclectic array of credits on screens big and small, and what better way to celebrate his three-decade anniversary as a working actor than by naming some of them at random and putting Compte on the spot to see how good his memory is?

First up: his feature-length debut in Tom Berenger’s 1996 action thriller, The Substitute. “It was my first audition ever,” Compte reminisced. “I had never gone on an audition. I had been doing plays, but it was my first film audition. I go in, I get it. I was supposed to have a scene where I’m kind of threatening the director, and I didn’t know, I had never done it, so I took it a little too far, and I got too close to the casting director’s face.”

He thought he’d blown it, but his youthful exuberance had landed him his first movie. Not only that, but The Substitute was a case of art imitating life. “We shot that film in my high school, the high school I had just graduated from, Miami Senior High,” the actor added. “Not only that, but we shot it in the classroom where I took history.” His foot was officially in the door, and Compte compared it to a fairy tale.

Back when it was arguably the single biggest show on TV, Compte appeared in three episodes of 24‘s second season as Cole, and his overriding memory wasn’t so much about the show itself, but of its star, Kiefer Sutherland, who literally lived on the set in his trailer and started each morning with a musical medley.

“While they were still setting up, eventually Kiefer’s door would open, and Kiefer would step out of his trailer with sweats and a guitar with no shirt on, and he would sit, smoke a cigarette, have his coffee, and play his guitar,” he revealed. “Every morning you would wake up to Kiefer with a cigarette, a coffee, and his guitar, sitting cross-legged on a chair, and just playing his guitar, and it was fantastic. And then he’d go in and, like, save the world again, you know?”

In his first big studio movie, Compte had a small part as Chili in the otherwise forgettable 2002 action comedy, Showtime. That said, while he wasn’t in the greatest place personally at the time, which he declined to go into at length, he’ll never forget the pinch-me moment he had sharing a set with Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy at the same time.

“It was a lesson that I needed to learn in my life. In Hollywood, I was reactive, and I was insecure as an actor when I was young,” the star recalled. “I needed to grow up, and that was one of the first films where I learned that I needed to grow up.” There was still a silver lining, though, as shooting the breeze with a couple of superstars tends to be for a young and still relatively unknown performer.

“I remember just saying, like, ‘Wow, Maurice, that’s Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy sitting across from me, talking to you, you’re doing a scene with them for the first time,'” he marvelled. “It was the first feeling that I got of something feeling disjointed inside of me, where, if you can’t believe that good stuff is happening to you, you won’t have to not believe it for too long, because it’ll get taken away from you.”

Jumping forward by a decade, Compte antagonised Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña in Ayer’s gritty 2012 crime thriller, End of Watch, where his character ‘Big Evil’ lived up to his name: “I was in such a great place in my life that when this thing came, I was like, ‘I’m going to just shave my head, I’m going to go all in for this, I’m going to have a great time, because who cares?'”

With that mindset, he decided he was “going to do this crazy thing” with the character. “And David loved it,” as it happened, “And it became the basis of Big Evil, because I didn’t play Big Evil from the fullness of being a gangster, I played it from the emptiness of being disconnected and wanting to find something that makes you feel connected.” The very same year, Compte was cast as Gaff in Breaking Bad, which we’d be remiss not to bring up.

An enforcer and hitman for the Juárez Cartel in the fourth season, he ended up being garrotted by Mike Ehrmantraut, giving him a memorable death scene into the bargain. Despite its popularity, he’d never seen the show until shortly before he was up for the role, in what seemed like the fates aligning in his favour.

“A month or two prior, people had been telling me to watch Breaking Bad, and it wasn’t until that year that I watched Breaking Bad, and I was like, ‘Man, this is the most amazing show in the world, wow!'” which must have been meant to be. “And then I get a call to go audition for it.” Equally memorable was the camaraderie away from the set, which created a competitive environment.

“The funny thing was, on the weekends, because we were in New Mexico, like, Pinkman and Mr White, we would all go bowling. There were bowling leagues, so you would be in a bowling league playing against Pinkman or Mr White,” even if he didn’t reveal how he fared on the lanes against Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. “It was amazing. It was a very, very tight cast and crew, and they had something special, and they knew it.”

Along with the movies and TV shows we’ve talked about, which featured such luminaries as Nolan, Tarantino, De Niro, Murphy, Schnabel, Javier Bardem, and others, Compte has also worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger on End of Watch, Bruce Willis in Once Upon a Time in Venice, and Neeson in A Walk Among the Tombstones, among others, but there remains one ultimate dream name on his list.

As for what comes next? Compte isn’t one for specifics, and as he alluded to earlier, it’s all about the feeling, more than anything else: “I’m a big believer in the Maya Angelou saying: ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.'”

“I think that one of the things that really defines a journey of life is how we’re feeling from moment to moment within ourselves and in relation to other people,” the actor closed off.

“So if I could do any role and that was given to me, it would definitely be something related to how we can all feel that feeling of wholeness within ourselves. That’s about it for me: anything like that, and it’s a good day.”

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