Breaking Bad Star Planned Own Murder Before Getting Cast

Giancarlo Esposito appeared in an episode of SeriusXM’s Jim & Sam show to promote his new AMC drama series Parish. As the conversation flowed, the actor gave some insight into his life before fame and revealed how concerned he’d been about the financial protection of his children. As he revealed, things got so bad in 2008 that it sometimes seemed like his only option to provide for his family would be, as he described it, self-annihilation.

“My way out in my brain was: ‘Hey, do you get life insurance if someone commits suicide? Do they get the bread?’” Giancarlo Esposito recalled. “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.”

The actor began scheming his own death in 2008, a year before he booked the part of Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, a role that would go on to change his life and put him on the path of booking jobs on more major shows like The Mandalorian, The Boys, and more.

“That was the first inkling that there was a way out, but I wouldn’t be here to be available to my kids,” Giancarlo Esposito added, recalling how he considered the pros and cons of plotting his murder. He eventually decided not to actively seek out his own death once he considered the lifelong pain he would cause his family. 

“There’d be lifelong trauma that would just extend the generational trauma I’m trying to move away from,” Giancarlo Esposito explained. Luckily, he soon booked Breaking Bad and finally found his big break—both financially and in his career. He now has an estimated net worth of around $4 million.

Giancarlo Esposito portrayed Gus Fring across 26 episodes of Breaking Bad and later revisited the role for 34 episodes in the prequel series Better Call Saul. The actor has expressed keen interest in bringing Gus back to the small screen once more for a potential prequel series that would dive deeper into the character’s backstory.

If that prequel happens, Giancarlo Esposito already has an idea of how it would go. “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,” the actor said. “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.”

Giancarlo Esposito compared Gus Fring to Tony Montana from Scarface. Explaining, “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.’”