Giancarlo Esposito is used to frightening people. After all, he’s built a career out of it. Once, while on a flight, a woman waiting for the toilet saw him coming up the aisle and was so scared that she begged him to go before her. Bemused, he did: “I came out and said, ‘Have a nice piss!’” Even the tallest, most muscular men who approach him admit they feel intimidated in his presence. “My talents are facial expressions and intensity,” he says. “A guy last weekend said, ‘Wow, you’re not a big man, but you’re so frightening!’ It’s all about energy; that’s all we are as human beings, we’re energy.”

He may frighten people, but it’s all an act: one he has played to perfection. Over the last decade he’s become Hollywood’s go-to baddie since his turn as Gus Fring, the menacing meth kingpin in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. 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. Next year, he will be Marvel’s newest big bad in Captain America: Brave New World. When we speak, he is in Toronto filming something he can’t tell me anything about, which leaves me racking my brains for a megafranchise he hasn’t been in yet.

When he’s just being himself, Esposito is warm and effusive, prone to flapping his hands in a way that reveals his Italian heritage. At 66, he is blessed with a face that seems to get more handsome as time adds lines. He’s “Papa” to four daughters, who he loves talking about. He also brings up energy and love and the universe a lot; more engaged with the metaphysical than I anticipated for a guy who specialises in playing cold, ruthless men. He likes surprising people with his warmth, because he sees himself as an entertainer. “And if I’m just playing myself over and over and over again, without any salt or pepper, is it still entertainment?” he asks.

At a recent convention – he “really loves” fan conventions – he overheard some people laughing at a woman who was so overwhelmed by his presence that she couldn’t look him in the eye. “I could tell she was really an intense human being, and it was a big moment in her life to meet me,” he says. “She didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to force her. I didn’t do the … ”

His face and posture snap into the blank mask of Gus Fring: shark-eyes, deep monotone. “‘Look at me. Woman, look at me,’” he says, quietly, coldly, then blink, Gus is gone and Papa is back.

“She was just really shy and needed a hug,” he says, holding his chest. “So I gave her one! And she put her head right in my chest and she was on the verge of tears. She just needed some love.”

Esposito is having the time of his life. 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). He’s happy to do it all, because this level of fame still feels exciting. He describes his career as having three rises to stardom: first on Broadway, then in film, now on television. But with rises come falls.

He 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. (His surname is pronounced “eh-POZZI-toh”, though he accepts that people default to “es-POH-sito”, thinking he is Latino.)

The Espositos moved from Rome to Manhattan when he was five, where his parents separated. He was raised first Baptist, then Catholic; he became an altar boy and considered the priesthood. He and his older brother were sent away to a Catholic military school; he considered joining the military. Religion and service offered discipline and a sense of belonging, both of which he craved.

But he came from a family of performers and, by 10, he was a musical star, making his Broadway debut in Maggie Flynn. As he got older he moved from theatre and into film: his breakout role was in Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze. Over the following four years, Lee and Esposito (who are still great friends) worked together three more times, on Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues and Malcolm X. It was an exhilarating time for Esposito, even if his white father didn’t understand it; when he saw Do the Right Thing, his father criticised it for having “too much cursing”. “That was when I realised, he didn’t know what it was like being in my skin,” Esposito recalls.

He had a uniquely varied career on screen: he was Big Bird’s camp counsellor on Sesame Street, an FBI agent in The Usual Suspects, a cadet in Taps. But by the late 90s, work began to dry up. “It was a really difficult time. I chased breadcrumbs,” he says. By the late 90s, he was bankrupt. The bank took his house. He got divorced. “I was getting work as a guest star, but I was living over my head – I had too many kids, too fast,” he says. He said yes to small roles in every procedural going: Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, CSI, Bones.

Things were so bad that he began to consider the unthinkable: hiring someone to kill him, so his family could get the insurance payout.

“I was in a really desperate position,” he says. “My former wife’s family were all in insurance, so her father had a big life insurance policy on me. I started asking these very pointed questions, like: can you collect life insurance if you die from misadventure? Can you collect life insurance if you kill yourself? I was going down the list to figure out what options I had. I eventually realised none of those would work – but, if someone killed me, that might be different, and it might be worth the price of the ticket to have my family be OK.”

“It was a horrible thought. But eventually I realised, the sacrifice is you would never experience them being OK. You’d never have the opportunity to experience all the love they have for you and you for them. But I did really consider it.”

Did he ever consider quitting acting? “Become Mr Mom and stay at home to take care of my kids? I probably would have,” he says. “But my instinct was always to go out and bring the world home. And when I act, I tune the world out. Everything is gone. All the voices in my head go away. All my worries about my children, the bills, it goes away, because I’m in flight.”

When he joined Breaking Bad in 2009, creator Vince Gilligan couldn’t believe they could get him, completely unaware of what dire straits he’d been in. Esposito throws himself into every character: to play Gus Fring, he did yoga to gain better control over his breath, which helped with his frightening stillness: “It allowed me to give you a chance to see my emotion before I even spoke. Now that’s scary.” To play Moff Gideon, he practised lightsaber fighting with a broom at home: “I did! I picked up a few different sticks because I needed to figure out how to wield it.” Never mind that he was going to get training on set – this is not the Esposito way.

For him, no baddie is just a baddie. He convinced Gilligan to make Fring a generous employer – if anything, making him capable of kindness just made him scarier – and on The Mandalorian, he talked showrunner Jon Favreau into making Gideon desperate to wield the force, a desire that made him more interesting. He’s never afraid of talking directors into making changes. “Intention is everything. Intention can be seen and felt, but it can also be stated. I like to encourage people to ask for what they want,” he says, then smiles. “My family has a list of Giancarlo-isms, and that’s one of them: ‘Ask for what you want.’ Say it to the world!”

Tell me some others, I say. “Never leave a man behind!” he shouts. “One of my daughters is always wandering off – now it may be my military-school training, but you just don’t leave a man behind! And ‘Head on a swivel’! I’m hyper-vigilant because people recognise me all the time, so I always tell the girls this because they are always walking around like this,” he says, tapping away at an imaginary phone. “Head on a swivel!”

Someone once told him that acting can heal actors, which he still believes deeply. “Playing very intense characters has helped me to realise how intense I am, and made it OK,” he says. “The opportunity to play so many different kinds of characters with foibles – evil, mean, liars, cheaters, killers – has allowed me to tap into an energy, to look at who I am when I’m in that character’s skin. How angry am I? How mean can I be? How happy can I be? How funny can I be? It allows me to look at all the dark and light spaces within myself. And that has helped me all my life.”

• Giancarlo Esposito is appearing at Oz Comic-Con Sydney, 21-22 September. Megalopolis is in cinemas on 26 September in Australia and 27 September in the UK and US.