Wealth & Money Quote by Hector Elizondo

Elizondo treats parenthood less like a private identity and more like an artistic endowment: a hard-earned stash of lived detail he can withdraw from when the script turns thin. The phrase "intense parenting" does a lot of quiet work. It isn’t bragging, exactly; it’s a coded admission that the job was consuming, maybe messy, maybe costly. By refusing specifics, he protects the intimacy while still claiming its value. That restraint is the point: the richest material stays unnamed.

The banking metaphor is canny because it reframes emotional labor as craft capital. Parenting becomes compound interest: sleepless nights, fear, guilt, tenderness, boredom, the constant negotiation of selfhood against responsibility. Calling them "secrets" is the tell. Not secrets in the scandal sense, but in the actor’s sense: internal anchors, sense memories, the private switch that turns a line reading into something lived-in. He’s describing how authenticity is manufactured - not faked, but processed, translated.

There’s also a quiet rebuke here to the myth that great work comes from aloof genius. Elizondo’s version of depth is domestic and cumulative. The subtext is almost pragmatic: you don’t need trauma to make art; you need stakes. Parenting supplies those in bulk, and once you’ve survived it, you own a repertoire of reactions and instincts no acting class can teach. When he says it makes your work "rich", he’s talking about texture - the tiny, unshowy truths that audiences feel before they can explain.