Breaking Bad & The Mandalorian Star Giancarlo Esposito Once Contemplated Putting A Hit Out On Himself

Giancarlo Esposito became a major star thanks to his role as Gus Fring in Breaking Bad – but in a dark confession, he admits to nearly ending his own life prior, just before Breaking Bad delivered the opportunity he’d been waiting for.

During an interview with SiriousXM’s Jim & Sham Show, Esposito revealed how in 2008 he was a such a low point professionally and personally (two bankruptcies and a home foreclosure) that he started thinking up a plan to hire a hitman to kill him so that he could leave his family the money from his life insurance policy. He recalled how he started probing his wife at the time, Joy McManigal, to see what their insurance policy required for a payout: 

“The first thing that had me think there was a way out, was my wife’s father – God rest his soul – Pops McManigal was in insurance,” Esposito explained. “So I asked [my ex-wife], I started poking around, ‘How much am I insured for?’ And then she told me. My way out in my brain was, I said, ‘Hey, do you get life insurance, if someone commits suicide, do they get the bread?’ And my wife said, ‘Well, that’s kind of tricky.’”

“She had no idea why I was asking her this stuff,” Esposito continued. “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.”

So, as you can see, Giancarlo Esposito was not just playing Gus Fring in Breaking Bad – Gus Fring was just an extension of Giancarlo Esposito! 

In all seriousness, is mind-boggling to think that Esposito – now so beloved for his character acting, and currently has no less than two big TV shows out (Netflix’s The Gentlemen, AMC’s Parish) and four big films (Abigail, MaXXXine, Megapolis, The Electric State) dropping this year. Thankfully, Esposito found a path out of that dark place through the realization that money would never fill the whole his death would create:

“I started to think, that’s not viable because the pain I would cause them would be lifelong, and lifelong trauma that would just extend the generational trauma with which I’m trying to move away from,” he said. “The light at the end of the tunnel was Breaking Bad. I had a few little things before to start to recover, but Breaking Bad was the light.”

“Breaking Bad was the light,” is not a sentence you hear every day. But thankfully, it turned out to be true.  

You can see Giancarlo Esposito in Abigail (in theaters), The Gentleman (streaming on Netflix) and, Parish (airing on AMC).