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‘I was really desperate’: Giancarlo Esposito on Gus Fring, Sesame Street – and how he nearly hired a hitman

His Breaking Bad role may have brought him worldwide fame, but at one point the actor nearly paid someone to kill him – so his family could get the insurance money

He’s played an aristocratic drug lord in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen; the war criminal Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, hunting for baby Yoda across space; ruthless Stan Edgar in The Boys, wrangling a squad of spoilt superheroes; and corrupt Mayor Cicero in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. He doesn’t mind when people want him to do a bit of Fring, or when they stop him to show their tattoos of his face, or to pose for a photo – often with him holding something threateningly to their neck, re-creating an iconic Breaking Bad scene involving a box cutter (fans must make do with safer objects, like bananas). Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/AlamyHe was born in Copenhagen, to an Italian stagehand father and a Black American opera singer from Alabama; his parents met in Italy while his mother was touring Europe in a production of Porgy and Bess.

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