Giancarlo Esposito has opened up about moving past the embarrassment of filing for bankruptcy nearly two decades ago.
The actor, who stars in the upcoming animated family comedy The Cat in the Hat, appeared on Tuesday (Nov. 10) episode of Mythical Kitchen and reflected on his financial struggles in 2008, around the time he separated from his then-wife, Joy McManigal. The pair divorced in 2015 after 20 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 revealed that receiving a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? helped him, as the book uses relatable analogies to show readers how to reinvent themselves.
Earlier in the interview, Esposito recalled how his family struggled financially after his parents divorced following roughly a decade 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 separation in the late 2000s, Esposito was trying to provide for his family in Connecticut while the bank moved to foreclose on his home. “I was broke, I was bankrupt,” he said during a 2024 appearance on 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.”
