Mark Margolis as Hector "Tio" Salamanca on Breaking Bad

“So you want to talk about Breaking Balls?”

Actor Mark Margolis was sitting in a streetside table at Josephine, the French café near his Tribeca apartment. The actor, who has an olive complexion and a fringe of white hair, is in constant motion: cracking jokes, doing impressions, and giving a running commentary on passers-by. After greeting a local by name, he turned back to us and smirked: “All these guys in the neighborhood wear the same thing: greased hair, white pressed pants ... they all look like they’re about to take a meeting with John Gotti.” (These goodfellas have a tendency to ask the actor if he’s “woikin,” which irks Mr. Margolis. “I want to ask them, ‘Are you woikin?’”)

Mr. Margolis’s volubility might surprise anyone who recognizes the 72-year-old actor for his work on Breaking Bad. On the hit AMC series, he played Hector “Tio” Salamanca, a character who is paralyzed and unable to speak (save the odd flashback), communicating solely via a small brass service bell.
Ding ding ding!

Making his first appearance in the second season of the show—back when Walter White (Bryan Cranston) was still ostensibly a good guy caught in a bad situation—Salamanca was introduced as the incapacitated uncle of ruthless meth kingpin Tuco. Ask not for whom his bell tolled! Prior to Tuco’s bloody demise, Salamanaca’s little chime became a surprisingly effective plot device: He used it to thwart Walter and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) when they tried to poison his nephew, then granted them a reprieve by declining to identify Pinkman to the police. (Tio would rather die than snitch.)

Subsequent seasons revealed Salamanca as more than just a geezer put out to pasture: As the former enforcer to Mexican crime boss Don Eladio, he still had enough sway to call in a few favors to avenge his nephew’s death. (Not that the process wasn’t laborious; when the hired guns showed up, Salamanaca needs to go through a whole Diving Bell and the Butterfly routine with letters on a Ouija board to let them know who to whack.)

Mr. Margolis was asked to describe the series. “It’s a show about a guy with lung cancer,” he said. “It’s a comedy.”

It was the finale of Season 4 that made Hector Salamanca a star: his suicide mission to destroy soft-spoken fried-chicken mogul-slash-drug kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). Salamanca’s last stand might have been a figurative one, but no one will forget those final explosive dings, or the character’s furiously writhing face, now a popular meme. The intensity of that scene alone—which again, is played without the actor speaking a word—might have been enough on its own to earn Mr. Margolis his nomination for Best Guest Actor at this year’s Emmys.

Mark is “one of the sweetest, funniest gentlemen I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad’s creator, told The Observer. “Also, he’s one of the finest actors alive, regardless of whether the role requires him to speak or remain silent in a wheelchair, ringing a bell.”

“Mark has a distinct pedigree in the acting world and a respected reputation,” noted Mr. Cranston, “but his contribution on Breaking Bad came down to keeping it simple. And in our business, simple is hard. To convey a full range of emotion without saying a word, speaks volumes.”

In addition to his various TV roles, Mr. Margolis’ has appeared in every Darren Aronofsky film since taking a role as a math professor in the director’s breakout indie flick, Pi. You can spot him in brief flashes: As a ballet patron in Black Swan, a pawn shop owner in Requiem for a Dream, managing the trailer park that Mickey Rourke called home in The Wrestler. In The Fountain, Mr. Aronofsky created a role especially for Mr. Margolis: a “stoned priest.”

For Mr. Aronofosky’s upcoming biblical adaptation, Noah, starring Russell Crowe, Mr. Margolis traveled to Iceland to shoot several scenes; upon returning, Mr. Aronofsky tweeted, “Please give this legend an Emmy,” with a photo of the actor attached. He followed it up the next day: “to clarify: mark margolis an actor from my films is nom for his first Emmy. a veteran and legend an has never won anything. so help him win.”

Margolis as Salamanca with Giancarlo Esposito's Gus Fring

Mr. Margolis’ might be fighting for recognition, but he is recognizable ... sometimes to his detriment. Over the course of his half-century career, the actor has been cast in standout roles that attract a certain type of fan: Besides playing a Mexican gangster and a South American assassin in Scarface, he is most recognizable for having portrayed the HIV-positive Italian mob boss Antonio Nappa in HBO’s Oz.

“A lot of the people that stop you—well, they’re not nuts, exactly. They’re more like super fans,” Mr. Margolis said ruefully. “They think that I’m some sort of rich guy, that everyone in the movies is making the kind of money Angelina Jolie is making. They don’t realize that most of my life has been a struggle. Maybe the last 15, 20 years have been okay, I’ve been able to make a living.”

Once or twice, there has been a situation—when the actor failed to adequately acknowledge the “street thugs” who recognized him for his more badass characters, especially his turn in Scarface as a henchman in Alejandro Sosa’s Bolivian crime syndicate.
“I used to get these young guys on the subway coming up to me,” Mr. Margolis said. “They’d say, ‘You know that car scene with Pacino ... why weren’t you getting the drop on him before he shot you?”’

“I always tell them, ‘Because there was a script.’” Mr. Margolis rolled his eyes. He’s over it. As for that infamous Pacino car scene—the one in which Tony Montana tells Mr. Margolis’ character, “No wife, no kids!” before shooting him in the head—the actor has a couple of fond memories.

“The thing about Al was that you didn’t know when he was going to start being Tony. We’d be sitting in the car, and he’d just start in about how ugly all of us were—how between the four of us, we’d be able to make one good-looking guy.”

Despite playing a Mexican gangster, Mr. Margolis doesn’t speak Spanish, and has been called out on several message boards for his incorrect grammar in a certain flashback sequence. Still, he preferred that type of nit-picky criticism to the kind he received from some members of the Italian-American community for playing Nappa. “They’d always say, ‘Why is this heeb playing the Godfather?’”

Mr. Margolis’ came by his talent through serious training. After graduating from Temple University, he moved to the city and fell into a job with as a personal assistant to Stella Adler. “She was a god in the classroom, but out on the street she didn’t know which way was uptown!” he recalled. He would take the famous acting teacher to shop at Bloomingdale’s, help her carry her groceries home from the store, and check coats whenever she threw a party. “I had a real fixation with her. I was 19 years old and she was 60. That’s what a turn-on she was.”

He later took a class with Lee Strasberg, though he was soon bored by the Actor’s Studio director’s “tiny personality.”

He is married to Jacqueline Margolis, also an actor, and his son Morgan has appeared in small roles on shows like Dexter, CSI, Walker: Texas Ranger, and the Knight Rider reboot. The younger Margolis put acting on hold after the birth of his second child to focus on a more lucrative endeavor: he’s now the president and CEO of Knitting Factory Entertainment.

According to Mr. Margolis, his son was the one who came up with idea of moving the original Knitting Factory venue from Houston Street to Brooklyn in 2008.

“He’s an amazing kid,” Mr. Margolis said, shaking his head. “He’s so fucking smart. I don’t know where he got it from. When he was a baby in the ’60s, he was spending his time in vans with hippies, riding with us all over New Mexico, Arizona, you name it. If he was crying, we would blow pot smoke in his face to help him fall asleep. It’s amazing he can function at all.

“Of course, you could never do that now,” Mr. Margolis added, somewhat nostalgically. “They’d call child services. But I’m told I was a good dad.”

The Emmy Award nomination was Mr. Margolis’ first. He was up against some heavy competition, including Michael J. Fox as a conniving litigator in The Good Wife. (Mr. Fox and Mr. Margolis appeared together in the 1993 film Where the River Flows North. “It was a beautiful movie, but sad too, because Michael had just been diagnosed,” he recalled.)

It’s a testament to Mr. Margolis that he is not only perfectly convincing as a frustratingly incapacitated character, but that he manages to radiate so much hostility without being able to speak or move. With only the slightest facial tic—like the twitching pout of the lips in last season’s finale—you could feel the hatred Salamanca bears towards the rest of the characters as clearly as if he said the words out loud.

When asked about the nuances of his role, Mr. Margolis claimed that he took most of his cues from his mother-in-law, Shirley, a follies dancer who had suffered a stroke and remained in a nursing home in Florida. “She used to do this little thing with her mouth,” Mr. Margolis said, imitating the tobacco-chewing motion he used on the show. “She’d do that whenever she saw us come into a room.”

But how does one even get into the mindset of a dangerous drug cartel member who also happens to be an elderly stroke victim?
“You don’t play villains like they are villains,” said Mr. Margolis, who was recently seen on the stage in a upstate New York production based on the life of Bernie Madoff. (He was Madoff, naturally.) “You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.”

Although Mr. Margolis didn’t get his Emmy—in the Creative Arts Emmys announced Sunday, he lost to Justified’s Jeremy Davies—it seems we may not have seen the end of Salamanca: “I think they’re bringing me back for a dream sequence next season,” he said.

Is 'Girls' Overrated? (HBO)

This year, the 9th annual Tubey awards—the anti-Emmy Awards, created by the website TelevisionWithoutPity.com—is hoping to beat its own record of 26 million votes by asking its readers to take part in one of the most esoteric TV electoral processes known to man. ("Show We Most Love to Hate-Watch" or "Cutest Kid on Reality TV," anyone?)

Though the voting is broken up into several weeks of questions, The New York Observer spoke to TWP's Site Director Dan Manu about the Tubeys and one of next week's hot topics: whether Girls qualifies as the most overrated show on TV this year.

NY Observer: What do the Tubey's provide that, say, the Emmys don't?

Dan Manu: The Tubeys are a reaction to the critical community of television, although maybe not in the way you might think. The Emmys have been good to the Breaking Bads of the world: the cream of the crop, the ones that all critics pick as the best show of the year. What the Emmys don't capture is the sense of fun people have watching TV, or the different ways people consume TV. We all don't watch stuff that is quality, Peabody Award-winning writing...we also watch that's a lot of fun, and we hate-watch programs. And that's just as valid a reason to watch TV as any. So the Tubeys are about capturing how fans experience TV from the fans' point of view.

NY Observer: What are some of the new categories you've seen this year?

DM: Well, we allow our fans to help decide the categories for us, and that sort of allows us to figure out the trends for that year. Like last year, we had a category for Most Likeable Geek. We don't have that category this year, because we didn't have the same kind of characters stand out. But Hate-Watch is a big one we added this year...we (over at Television Without Pity) have always been Hate-Watching shows, but only in the past year has that been a term that people have begun to use. Then there's always the big "shipper" categories. That stands for people who root for relationships on screen, and it can be "Best Platonic Relationship" to "Best Almost Romantic But Not Quite Relationship."

NY Observer: So what is the issue with Girls this season? Didn't the big New York show live up to its hype?

DM: It's funny that you call it a "big New York show" when there are all these reports coming out that show that its mostly people outside of New York who watch it, as opposed to New Yorkers themselves. And how most of Girls watchers are older dudes.

I definitely see it as something that people outside that world view more than people inside that world. Because people inside that world...

NY Observer:...don't own TVs?

DM: (Laughing) Yes. But also find more faults with it. But Girls is nominated for "Most Overrated Show," which is, in a way, where it belongs. Because even though we're pretty supportive of the show as a site—not only because of the issues it brings up, but because it is funny—we think that some of the people covering it got too into the politics of Girls.

NY Observer: But how does that make it overrated?

DM: Well, is there any show that could have lived up to the hype of Girls? Again, it's not us saying that, it's our readers, but if you go back and look at the early reviews, people saying this is a show for us and by us.

And quality-wise, I think the show dipped as it went on. Some story lines were better than others...but it certainly wasn't the transformational show that people wanted. It didn't catch much fire with the public. Maybe Season 2 will do that.

To vote for the Tubeys, go to TelevisionWithoutPity.com.

• 30 Rock
• The Big Bang Theory
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Louie
• New Girl
• Modern Family

Sorry, guys: Girls skews a little young for this crowd. All of the shows on this list are essentially perma-nominees at this point, but for Louie, which is so well-regarded among the establishment that its nomination seems likely, and New Girl, which is youngish but is sort-of, kind-of an actual hit on broadcast TV (unlike possible nominees like Parks and Recreation).

Best Drama

• Breaking Bad
• Downton Abbey
• Game of Thrones
• The Good Wife
• Homeland
• Mad Men

The Good Wife sneaks in just so broadcast TV is represented somehow; the rest are the five TV shows (yes, Downton is a series now, not a miniseries) that combined critical acclaim with your co-workers asking if you were caught up yet. (Poor, not-quite-loved Boardwalk Empire.)

Best Actress, Comedy

• Laura Dern, Enlightened
• Zooey Deschanel, New Girl
• Lena Dunham, Girls
• Tina Fey, 30 Rock
• Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
• Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation

We stand by our prediction!

Best Actor, Comedy

• Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
• Louis C.K., Louie
• Jon Cryer, Two and a Half Men
• Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Johnny Galecki, The Big Bang Theory
• Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory

Now that perpetual bridesmaid Steve Carell is no longer on TV, there's a spot open, and perhaps it'll go to the guy who helped keep Two and a Half Men on the air, if in attenuated form. Mr. Cryer's already won an Emmy as a supporting actor, anyhow.

Best Actress, Drama

• Claire Danes, Homeland
• Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife
• Elizabeth McGovern, Downton Abbey
• Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men
• Jessica Paré, Mad Men

Lots of turnover in this category! But presumably Ms. Hargitay will remain, constant, impassive, immovable.
Best Actor, Drama

• Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
• Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
• Kelsey Grammer, Boss
• Hugh Laurie, House
• Damian Lewis, Homeland
• Jon Hamm, Mad Men

With the exception of Hugh Laurie (whose show just ended), this is a party of all the ill-behaved men of cable TV.

Lena Dunham (Getty Images)

The Emmy nominations will be announced July 19, and we're already wondering who will end up nominated; in particular, the question of New York media darling Lena Dunham weighs upon us. Ms. Dunham, creator of HBO's Girls, could get anywhere between zero and four nominations  as creator, writer, director, and star of the show (she could get even more if multiple episodes are nominated for their directing and writing, which seems like a long shot). But is her acting Emmyish enough to stand up to a crowded category? Here are the six actresses whom we think will land in the winners' circle:

Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation: Ms. Poehler's little-watched NBC sitcom inspires slavish devotion among its fans, and Ms. Poehler is the most important element of a talented ensemble. She's like Ms. Dunham, but more establishment.

Tina Fey, 30 Rock: She's the creator, writer, and star of an aggressively outré comedy--that's been honored consistently through its now six-season run. She's like Ms. Dunham, but way more venerable.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep: She's the center of a well-regarded and often profane HBO comedy--and the past recipient of two Emmys, for Seinfeld and The New Adventures of Old Christine. She's like Ms. Dunham with a better pedigree.

Laura Dern, Enlightened: Though not widely-watched, Ms. Dern's Enlightened pushed the boundaries even of what HBO was capable of doing with the medium; her show was tragic and comic at once, and her performance transcended embarrassment to a sort of empathetic brilliance. She's like Ms. Dunham, but middle-aged-people hip and not young-people hip.

Zooey Deschanel, New Girl: The show set off a firestorm of criticism in the media for Ms. Deschanel's persona before it even aired--the question of "how should a girl on TV be?" was weirdly central to the discourse around this pretty unassuming actress. She's like Ms. Dunham, but somehow a little less controversial? (Everyone seems to have gotten over it.)

Lena Dunham, Girls. Given how central Ms. Dunham has been to the discourse of the latter half of the TV season, we have to assume she'll get in here. Or maybe we're just overthinking it!

Kate Winslet (Getty Images)

With this past weekend's Grammys, producer Scott Rudin became the latest entertainer to earn the ugly, ineffective title of "EGOT"--having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. (His new Grammy was for The Book of Mormon.) He's one of only eleven such winners--and the first in a decade. We demand yet more societal approbation for our most gifted singer/actor/producer/whatevers! Here, in order, are some entertainers who stand a chance of getting the Quadruple Crown (sorry, but a way better term than "EGOT") in the next ten years:

Kate Winslet

Why she could do it: All she needs is a Tony, having immediately jumped to TV once she had an Oscar in hand--and winning an Emmy immediately thereafter. She has the eye of the tiger and is likely training to play Mama Rose as we speak.

Mitigating factor: The Tonys have gotten more sensitive about awarding carpet-bagging movie stars.

Fun fact: She beat the Muppets, among others, to win her Grammy for Best Spoken-Word Album for Children.

Robin Williams

Why he could do it: We haven't heard from Robin Williams in a while, and it'd be a nice little comeback narrative if he were to win the Tony he needs to complete the square.

Mitigating factor: The last time we heard from him was an appearance on Broadway after a long absence in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, for which he failed to medal.

Fun fact: He probably shouldn't have an Oscar!

Al Pacino

Why he could do it: He just needs a Grammy, and other awards bodies have shown a willingness to hand Mr. Pacino trophies more as a signifier of respect/fear than for a decent performance (c.f.: Scent of a Woman).

Mitigating factor: Not known for a mellifluous voice, and a spoken-word album for children is probably out of reach.

Fun fact: He was nominated for a Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Any Given Sunday, which he lost to Tom Hanks.

Elton John

Why he could do it: He's missing an Emmy, and given the spotty state of his career (recently picking a fight he couldn't hope to win with Madonna over a song from Gnomeo and Juliet) is about five minutes from a PBS special or self-aggrandizing 30 Rock guest spot.

Mitigating factor: Has probably picked fights with half the television Academy; was not amazing on Saturday Night Live last year.

Fun fact: Is already a knight and summarily probably doesn't care about the Emmys.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Why they could do it: If and when The Book of Mormon comes to the screen, it could give the South Park creators the Oscar they need.

Mitigating factor: Failed to win an Oscar for their song from the South Park movie, and are probably better-remembered among Ernest Borgnine's contemporaries for dressing in drag at the ceremony.

Fun fact: Really wacky guys!

Cynthia Nixon

Why she could do it: She's such a Miranda! (By which we mean: Hardworking.)

Mitigating factor: The award she needs is the hardest one to get (the Oscar), and she was passed over for the Rabbit Hole role that got Nicole Kidman nominated last year.

Fun fact: Actually defines herself as "more of a Cynthia."