TV Roles That Really Messed With The Actor's Head

Acting is all about getting inside a character's head and investing a performance with that empathy. It's a difficult job to become a different person when the cameras are rolling and then turn that mindset off the moment a director yells "cut," and the hectic schedule of filming that most TV shows require makes that job even harder. Actors need to stay in character for weeks and even months at a time, and while that emotional investment can lead to some jaw-dropping performances, it can also wear on a performer's psyche.

The best actors infuse their characters with parts of their own personality, turning a role into a reflection of themselves. While that can lead to better performances overall, it can also lead to emotionally draining scenes and existential terror where the role ends and the actor begins. From actors who found themselves as depressed as their characters to stars uncomfortable with onscreen violence, here are TV roles that really messed with the actor's head.

Crime procedurals often thrive in the comforting rhythm of repetition. Following the same characters as they investigate criminal after criminal, often in storylines ripped directly from recent headlines, can be surprisingly engrossing. The hook for Criminal Minds that set it apart from shows like NCIS (boat crimes) and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (sex crimes) was that the show focused on understanding the psychology of the killers. It clearly proved effective.

The show's in-depth look at criminal minds proved to be a bit too in-depth for actor Mandy Patinkin, however. In an interview, he confessed that working on the show was one of the biggest regrets of his career. "I thought it was something very different. I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year," Patinkin said. "It was very destructive to my soul and my personality. After that, I didn't think I would get to work in television again." Patinkin would return to television again in Homeland, but his character on Criminal Minds was famously killed offscreen, so there's not much chance of him returning to that particular role.

Not all TV roles that mess with an actor's head are grim and gritty; some just involve an actor getting too emotionally invested. Donal Logue found himself in that situation while portraying washed up former police detective Hank Dolworth in Terriers. Logue's been a fantastic character actor for years, but the dense writing and close cast relationships in Terriers helped the actor put a lot of himself into the character; his onscreen sister was even played by Logue's real sister, Karina Logue.

Unfortunately, while the show was much loved by its fans, it was canceled after only one season and Logue was left to consider a future in acting that didn't involve Hank Dolworth. Logue even considered quitting Hollywood for good, saying, "I couldn't really afford to do it, but I just felt like quitting. Because I'd gotten so super emotionally attached to that show." Logue actually went through on his decision to quit, and wound up becoming a licensed truck driver before returning to Hollywood.

Very few actors have had the opportunity to explore the character range shown by Katey Sagal. From lazy housewife Peggy Bundy in Married... With Children to purple-haired mutant Leela in Futurama, Sagal's been a mainstay on television for years. As Gemma Teller, the matriarch of a biker gang in Sons of Anarchy, she was given the chance to flex her acting chops in a more dramatic fashion than past roles. In season 2 of the biker drama, Gemma is attacked by a rival gang in a viscerally unpleasant sequence that affects the character for the rest of the season.

In an interview, Sagal admitted that "it required me to visit some pretty dark places but just seemed to hang around with me after I left work... Before you know it, you're kind of visiting these places over and over again on a regular basis. Yeah, that was definitely kind of hard to shake."

There are plenty of loathsome villains in the history of television, but very few have been quite as young and quite as twisted as King Joffrey on Game of Thrones. Even among a cast full of violent monsters, the young king stood out as a repugnant character. Actor Jack Gleeson seems to be as kind-hearted as his character is not, since he's gone on record as feeling very conflicted over the violent acts committed in the show.

As Gleeson said in an interview with Rolling Stone, "You tend to abstract yourself from the creepiness of it when you're playing it, but when you see it on television, it sends shivers down my spine... I would like to try and defend him, but I would have a pretty hard job doing it." Gleeson even retired from acting after his time on the show ended, which was probably for the best, considering the kind of retirement his character faced.

If you were a bit upset by the end of Game of Thrones, you're not the only one. Kit Harington, the actor behind the "King of the North" Jon Snow, also had some issues with the finale. We won't spoil it if you're behind on your viewing, but suffice it to say that Harington became pretty attached to the character that he spent nearly a decade portraying. The end of the series and the end of that relationship led to Harington struggling with stress and alcohol abuse, and he checked himself into a rehab facility soon after. According to an earlier interview with Esquire, the actor's struggle to separate himself from the character has been a long-running effort. After filming the final episode, Harington said, "The weirdest bit was when we came off set and they started taking the costume off and it felt like being skinned. It felt like they were unceremoniously, for the last time, ripping off this character."

Thankfully, it seems that Harington's time in rehab went well, as he was seen around the grounds with his wife. Jon Snow might "know nothing," but luckily Harington knew enough to get help when he needed it.

One of the core elements of acting is finding a way to portray a character that's unlike you. It sounds obvious, but it can be an incredibly difficult thing for any actor to honestly portray someone who's lived a life vastly different from their own. What's a little less obvious is the difficulty in portraying a character that's a little too similar to yourself. Such was the case with Adamo Ruggiero while playing Marco in Degrassi: The Next Generation. In Degrassi, Marco is gay, and while Ruggiero would eventually come out in 2008, he was still struggling to reconcile his own closeted sexuality with the sexuality of his character at the time.

Ruggiero told Fab magazine that it was hard for him to see the positive impact he was having on gay youth without being out himself. "I was receiving fan mail from kids who wrote to thank me, saying 'I came out to my parents and friends because of you.' Since Marco came out before I did, I felt like a fraud. I hadn't opened up to my own parents, yet I was inspiring a generation to do just the very opposite."

While The Wire was generally pretty down to earth in terms of its presentation of the drug trade, political pressures, and systemic injustices of Baltimore, one character seemed to walk straight out of a mythic western. That would be Omar, played by Michael K. Williams. While other characters dealt with broken wiretaps or new rivals dealing drugs on their corners, Omar walked around Baltimore with a shotgun and his own whistled theme song. But while the character he played might have been larger than life, Williams himself was struggling while he acted.

In an interview with NPR, Williams went deep into how the character became a crutch for him as he battled drug addiction. "So [when] The Wire and the character of Omar ended, I had zero tools, personally speaking, in how to deal with letting that go. I... definitely wore that dark energy that Omar was — he was a dark soul, a tortured soul — and I just... lived in that and that's what people was attracted to. The lines got blurred." Luckily for Williams, he was able to work through his issues with a church pastor, and has remained more at peace even while he's played similarly intense characters in the years since.

Much like the animated opening that preceded each episode of Mad Men, so too did Jon Hamm's Don Draper continue to fall through life during the show. The character constantly slipped up and made poor decisions, and brief flirtations with doing the right thing almost always ended up being empty promises. While that might have been frustrating for the viewers, it seems to have been even more frustrating for the actor behind the mad ad man.

Hamm told The Hollywood Reporter during a roundtable that "Obviously it's no fun to play a person who only makes the right decisions all the time, but it can be difficult to watch somebody, time and time again, who just continually makes [the same] mistakes. I think it got progressively more difficult for me. As Don's downward spiral continued, it became kind of relentless, and that takes its toll on your psyche." That dark effect on his psyche might explain why Hamm spent the next few years following Mad Men appearing in sitcoms. We all practice self-care in our own unique ways.

As Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." While some actors don't worry about that literary idiom, plenty more find it inordinately stressful to play the antiheroes and outright villains that they're occasionally asked to portray. In the case of James Gandolfini, there's an argument to be made that he more or less created an entire genre with his work as the tortured mobster Tony Soprano. After The Sopranos aired, it became common to refer to the wave of "difficult men" television shows as the Golden Age of Television. Whether or not you buy that, you can't argue that Gandolfini didn't throw himself into his role.

According to Brett Martin's book Difficult Men, Gandolfini routinely would storm off set, disappear entirely, or curse endlessly between takes. Martin writes, "In papers related to a divorce filing at the end of 2002, Gandolfini's wife described increasingly serious issues with drugs and alcohol, as well as arguments during which the actor would repeatedly punch himself in the face out of frustration." At least his work frustrations weren't wasted; although Gandolfini tragically passed away of a heart attack in 2013, he's left a deep body of work behind.

When actors build a character based on themselves, it can get dicey pretty quickly. Where the line gets drawn between fiction and reality can be difficult for anyone who pretends for a living. For actor Will Arnett, Flaked originally seemed like the perfect way to exorcise some of his personal demons regarding alcoholism and his (at the time) recent divorce from his wife Amy Poehler. In Flaked, Arnett plays Chip, an alcoholic who spouts AA mantras while secretly drinking on the side. Unfortunately, while playing Chip, Arnett relapsed after 15 years of sobriety, in part because he believed that he needed to do so in order to live the part properly.

Worse, when the show premiered to negative reviews, Arnett had trouble accepting the criticism of the character as separate from criticism of himself. He told The Hollywood Reporter that "When you have a [reviewer] say, 'It's not even a good depiction of sobriety — that they do a better job on [CBS'] Mom,' you're like, 'What are you talking about?' This is actually f**ing happening [to me], you a**hole. This is actually happening in real time — as quickly as we can shoot, it's happening."