Giancarlo Esposito has revealed that, due to his financial struggles before Breaking Bad, he once considered arranging his own murder so his kids could inherit his life insurance.
The actor shared his story on a recent episode of SiriusXM’s Jim & Sam show while promoting his new AMC drama series Parish.
Esposito considered arranging his own murder in 2008, a year before he landed the iconic role of Gus Fring on Breaking Bad, a part that inextricably changed his career and opened the door for roles in The Mandalorian, The Boys and more.
Asked how he narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 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.”
He added: “That was the first inkling that there was a way out, but I wouldn’t be here to be available to my kids. 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.”
Actor Giancarlo Esposito, who played Gus Fring in “Breaking Bad,” reveals he considered suicide when he was broke and bankrupt in 2008.
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Esposito appeared as the drug lord Gus Fring on 26 episodes of Breaking Bad, then reprised the role on the prequel series Better Call Saul for 34 episodes. Earlier this year, he told British GQ that he is extremely interested in playing Gus for a third time in a prequel series about the villain.
“Yeah, I would love that,” he said. “My backstory is he was a military guy who worked his way up through the ranks and could have become president, even possibly the dictator and have taken over. But he wanted to do something that could not be controlled by others, and he wanted to control his own destiny. And so he took off to create a new life for himself in America and become a meth dealer, a businessman.”
“I think, in his younger years, he was someone who could have been more Tony Montana,” Esposito continued. “But he worked his way into becoming level enough to listen, hear, and see through his emotional state. We would hope that it might be ‘The Rise of Gus.’”
Back in February, fellow Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston revealed he was once a murder suspect in the 1970s after a colleague at a previous job was reported missing.
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