The Community and Pierce Hawthorne thread got me thinking, there’s a long tradition of killing off characters on TV shows, often in creative and embarrassing ways, when the actors quit after a conflict, demand too much money and / or amenities, or are just major pains in the butt.
Here are 5 I can think off just off the top of my head, without googling at all, because sometimes I like to exercise the ol’ rusty memory banks. So my memory is incomplete or may be wrong in spots. Feel free to correct me. We’'ll start off with Chevy:
Actor: Chevy Chase Character name: Pierce Hawthorne TV show: Community Reason for leaving / being kicked off show: Legendarily difficult actor to work with. Manner of character death: Masturbated to death?
Actor: Maclean Stevenson Character name: Henry Blake TV show: M*A*S*H Reason for leaving / being kicked off show: Decided (or was convinced) that he was too big to be a supporting character and needed his own starring vehicle. Manner of character death: Plane shot down when leaving Korea.
Actor: Charlie Sheen Character name: ?? TV show: Two and a Half Men Reason for leaving / being kicked off show: Being Charlie Sheen Manner of character death: Piano fell on him? Or something equally cartoonish.
Actor: Isaac Hayes Character name: Chef TV show: South Park Reason for leaving / being kicked off show: Became a Scientologist, started publicly badmouthing the show Manner of character death: Don’t remember exactly, but extremely embarrassing
Actor: Rosanne Barr Character name: Rosanne Connors TV show: Rosanne Reason for leaving / being kicked off show: Generally difficult to work with; making racist public statements was last straw. Manner of character death: Opiate overdose? Didn’t really watch the show.
Thanks, I amended the title from the more generic ‘Actors on TV shows whose characters are killed off’ to ‘Difficult actors on TV shows whose characters are killed off’, since that’s more what I was thinking of, not so much characters who are killed off because of plot arcs.
Dr. Drake Remoray on Days of Our Lives was killed off by falling down an elevator shaft. The actor, Joey Tribbiani, apparently badmouthed the writing team in TV Guide.
Ha, interesting meta-example there: a character’s character killed off because the actor who played a character who was an actor on one TV show badmouthed another TV show on which he played a character
I believe something similar happened to Poochie on “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” after his voice actor insisted on reading lines he wrote himself with his own two hands.
There were two actresses on Lost whose characters were killed off because of DUIs. I think there were other characters on that show who had to be killed off because the isolation of living in Hawaii away from their friends, agents, and future job opportunities in LA was more than those actors could stand.
I remember there was at least one other actor who left the show early for that reason- Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (I had to break down and google that name). From the below link:
Akinnuoye-Agbaje hated living in Hawaii, where Lost was filmed and all the cast members had a residence, and wanted to return to his native England.
Michael O’Hare on Babylon 5 was difficult to work with - not through any fault of his own, but because he was suffering from worsening schizophrenia. After starring as the show’s lead actor for a season, he asked to leave, and then returned a season later to have his character metamorphose into an alien and get sent thousands of years back into the past to become their great prophet and founder of their religion. As killing off characters go, it was pretty elegantly done.
Similar to the fate of the lead actor of Death in Paradise, the Inspector played by Ben Miller (a Brit) was murdered on the first show of the 3rd season because he just didn’t want to be stuck in the Caribbean, away from family and friends, for another production season. It’s not that he was difficult, but wanted out. Brilliantly, the first job of the new Inspector on that episode was to solve that murder (and prove himself to the Commissioner and the other 4 members of the police force).
Also, memorably, Sasha Alexander’s character from NCIS was killed off because she wanted out, doing the show was too much work.
Maybe “characters killed off because the actor wanted out of the show” should be a separate category.
Transparent ended with a one-off musical episode in which the Pfeffermans were shown dealing with the death of Maura - whose actor, Jeffrey Tambor, had left the show due to sexual harassment allegations.
They were both brought back though as guests in later seasons. Harold Perrineau said he was canned because he asked for more depth in his character, and to be honest I was tired of him yelling, “Walt! Where are you! I have to find my son!” every time I saw his face.
I just remembered the actor who played Carla’s hockey player husband on Cheers. He made a crack in an interview about how awful it was to have to kiss Rhea Perlman as part of his job so the writers had his character run over by a Zamboni.
Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. I wasn’t really a watcher of that show though.
No, that’s fine. The only exception I’d make is, as when @FlikTheBlue mentioned Sean Bean, not characters who are killed off TV shows strictly as part of the plot, for example Bean’s character on Game of Thrones. Only characters who are killed off due to real-life issues with the actors.
What’s more, the full details of what had happened weren’t made public for nearly 20 years. It was only after O’Hare’s death in 2012 that J. Michael Straczynski (creator and showrunner for Babylon 5) revealed what had been going on during the show’s first season, and why he largely wrote O’Hare’s character out of the show.
It was clear that JMS had a lot of respect and affection for O’Hare, despite the difficulties, and had promised to keep it a secret while the actor was still alive.
That’s odd, I did google this and that is the exact reason she publicly gave for leaving NCIS, but didn’t she immediately then get on Rizzoli and Isles, another network series? I would think one series would be about as much workload as another. I wonder if there was another reason she didn’t state publicly-- there was some bad blood between some of the other actors on NCIS.
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