Giancarlo Esposito once considered hiring a hitman in plan to support his family

When he was down on his luck and wanted to support his family and make sure his kids had a good life, Giancarlo Esposito almost took a very different route than his Breaking Bad character, Gus Fring. While Gus turned to the cartel, Esposito recently revealed that he seriously considered committing insurance fraud in 2008—by hiring a hitman to kill him.

“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,” the actor said on a recent episode of SiriusXM’s Jim & Sam radio show (via Entertainment Weekly). He was still getting roles at the time—in 2008 alone he appeared in episodes of the first series called New Amsterdam and CSI: Miami, as well as three small movies called Chelsea On The Rocks, Gospel Hill, and Xenophobia—but nothing that was really paying the bills. “I started scheming,” the actor continued. “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.”

What saved Esposito in the end was the understanding that the money wouldn’t be worth the trauma his family would have to endure. “That was the first inkling that there was a way out, but I wouldn’t be here to be available to my kids,” Esposito continued. “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.”

This all has a happy ending, of course. Since accepting his role in the ABQ meth trade, Esposito has gone on to star in films and series like The Boys, The Mandalorian, Dear White People, Abigail, and more many more, including Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul and (potentially) an upcoming, Gus-themed series called The Rise Of Gus.

Esposito thankfully avoided being part of this conversation in any material way, but hitmen are also kind of having a moment in cinema right now. Glen Powell and Richard Linklater’s Hit Man—in which Powell poses as a fake assassin—just dropped its first full-length trailer yesterday. (Hopefully Esposito would have hired someone like this had he actually gone through with his plan.) David Fincher’s The Killer followed a real assassin last year, and Dave Bautista’s upcoming The Killer’s Game follows the (awesome) premise that Bautista must “fight off all of Europe’s hitmen” after ordering and then canceling a hit on himself. Major, major spoilers if you click this link (you’ve been warned!) but a series coming to HBO in the future even follows a situation almost exactly parallel to Esposito’s. Luckily, that one’s completely fictional.