Giancarlo Esposito, famously known for his role as Gus Fring in “Breaking Bad,” recently shared that he was in dire financial straits before landing the role that transformed his career.
Esposito, during an episode of SiriusXM’s “Jim & Sam” show, where he was promoting his new AMC drama series “Parish,” revealed that around 2008, he was so broke that he once contemplated arranging his own murder so that his children could benefit from his life insurance money. This happened a year before he landed the role of Gus Fring, which subsequently opened doors for him to play roles in series like “The Mandalorian,” “The Boys,” and more.
Asked how he managed to get out of near bankruptcy around 2008, Esposito said, “My way out in my brain was: ‘Hey, do you get life insurance if someone commits suicide? Do they get the bread?’ My wife had no idea why I was asking this stuff. I started scheming. If I got somebody to knock me off, death by misadventure, [my kids] would get the insurance. I had four kids. I wanted them to have a life. It was a hard moment in time. I literally thought of self-annihilation so they could survive. That’s how low I was.”
“That was the first inkling that there was a way out, but I wouldn’t be here to be available to my kids,” Esposito added. “Then I started to think that’s not viable because the pain I would cause them would be lifelong, and there’d be lifelong trauma that would just extend the generational trauma I’m trying to move away from. The light at the end of the tunnel was ‘Breaking Bad.’”
Esposito appeared as Gus Fring on 26 episodes of “Breaking Bad,” then reprised the role on the prequel series “Better Call Saul” for 34 episodes. He expressed his keen interest in playing Gus for a third time in a prequel series about the villain.
Source: variety.com
