Giancarlo Esposito, now a famous actor, once thought about committing insurance fraud to help his family when times were tough in the 2000s.
He shared this during a recent interview on SiriusXM’s Jim & Sam show. Despite having steady work since the 1980s in movies like Taps and TV shows like Sesame Street, he faced financial difficulties in 2008.
“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,” recalled Esposito.
“I started scheming. If I got somebody to knock me off, death by misadventure, [my family] 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.”
“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,” he continued. “The light at the end of the tunnel was Breaking Bad.”
Things changed for him when he landed the role of Gus Fring on the AMC series Breaking Bad in 2009, earning him three Emmy nominations. Currently, Esposito stars in the movie Parish as a taxi driver whose life changes when he agrees to transport a Zimbabwean gangster.
