Actor Giancarlo Esposito recently revealed during an episode of SiriusXM’s Jim & Sam show while promoting his new AMC show Parish that before his iconic role of Gus Fring on Breaking Bad, which changed his career and opened the door for many more roles, he once considered arranging his own murder. Esposito considered the idea in 2008 due to his severe financial struggles at the time, so his kids could inherit his life insurance. Esposito asked his wife at the time if his children would be paid out if he died by suicide. “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,” says Esposito.
Esposito thought about the repercussions of possibly killing himself and decided against it because the trauma caused to his children would extend the generational trauma he was trying to move away from. Thankfully, the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be his successful breakthrough role as Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, which brought him to the forefront of the acting industry and opened the door for even more high-caliber roles.
Esposito reprised the role of Gus for 34 episodes on the prequel series Better Call Saul after appearing as the drug lord on 26 episodes of Breaking Bad. Earlier this year, Esposito told British GQ that he is extremely interested in playing Gus for a third time in a prequel series about the villain. He explained that Gus’s backstory is that he was a military guy who worked his way up through the ranks and could have become a president or even a dictator, but he wanted to do something that could not be controlled by others and instead chose to control his own destiny by becoming a meth dealer and businessman. “I think, in his younger years, he was someone who could have been more Tony Montana. 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’,” says Esposito.
Esposito’s story follows a similar vein to another Breaking Bad star, Bryan Cranston, who revealed earlier this year that he was once a murder suspect in the 1970s after a colleague at a previous job was reported missing. It seems as though both actors have had their fair share of trying times before hitting their big breaks in Hollywood
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