Key Takeaways
- Giancarlo Esposito opened up on Mythical Kitchen about the “shame and anxiety” that prevented him from discussing his 2008 bankruptcy publicly.
- Esposito said accepting failure and embracing honesty helped him rebuild and credited the book Who Moved My Cheese? with teaching him lessons on reinvention.
- He previously recalled facing foreclosure while supporting his family during his separation before joining the cast of Breaking Bad in 2009.
Giancarlo Esposito has persisted beyond the humiliation of having to declare bankruptcy nearly two decades ago.
The actor, who stars in upcoming animated family comedy The Cat in the Hat, was a guest on the Tuesday (Nov. 10) episode of Mythical Kitchen and recalled being in financial detriment in 2008, around the time of his separation from his then-wife, Joy McManigal. The couple divorced in 2015 after twenty years of marriage and share four children.
“I think the challenge in our lives is to accept that we failed at something and have to recreate ourselves,” Espositio said around the 41-minute mark of the video below.
“So I never shared it because of the shame and anxiety [of] allowing people to know that I had failed,” he continued. “It's growth, it's challenge, it's moving through the fire to get where you need to go. But it's also being honest. And that's something I wasn't back then.”
The actor also credited being given a book titled Who Moved My Cheese?, which provided analogies on how readers can reinvent their lives.
Earlier in the interview, the entertainer recalled his family being “poor” after his parents divorced after roughly ten years of marriage. “I remember Cream of Wheat. I remember grits. I remember bologna. [I] Got so tired of bologna, my mother used to fry it, which was the cheap, poor man’s bacon,” he shared.
During his late 2000s separation, Esposito was supporting his family in Connecticut and the bank was foreclosing on his house. "I was broke, I was bankrupt," he said on a 2024 episode of SiriusXM's Jim & Sam.
"I literally thought of self-annihilation so they could survive. That's how low I was," he said, adding, "The light at the end of the tunnel was Breaking Bad."
