Characters Killed Off Because Of The Actor's Bad Behavior

Losing a job is never fun. Sometimes it can be downright traumatic. You lose contact with the coworkers you got used to seeing every day, you lose your daily routine, and depending on your situation, you might lose your health insurance and your financial security. But imagine if, along with all the other losses you're forced to endure, being let go from your job meant losing your life.

That's what happened to the actors on this list ... well, only in a sense. It's no secret that some actors — regardless of their talent or popularity — lose jobs because of their behavior when the cameras are turned off. Some stir up public controversies on social media or in interviews, some get hostile when it's time to renegotiate contracts, and quite a few are known for making life far too difficult for the rest of the cast and crew. 

While the characters these actors play usually just disappear, sometimes that isn't enough. In some cases, whether it's out of malice or necessity, the writers decide the best way to say goodbye is to straight-up annihilate the character. Keep reading to learn about characters from TV and film who were killed off because of an actor's bad behavior.

A few years before he was chopping through orcs as the dwarf-warrior Gimli in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings series, John Rhys-Davies played Professor Maximillian Arturo on the science fiction series Sliders. Arturo acts as mentor to Quinn Mallory (Jerry O'Connell) as they and their friends use wormholes to travel to parallel universes. In the season three two-parter "The Exodus," Arturo sacrifices himself to save Quinn, taking a bullet meant for the younger hero. 

Nearly two decades after his departure from Sliders, Rhys-Davies told Digital Spy that the real reason he took the bullet wasn't to save Quinn but to save himself from bad writing. He said Sliders "could've been the best show on television," but that the writers "didn't have the vision" to tap its full potential, and he called the scripts "incomprehensible gibberish."

"If you're writing science fiction," Rhys-Davies said, "you should have read some science fiction and you should actually understand some science!" Rhys-Davies went on to say he clashed with the writers on a regular basis. "I would go to [the writers] and complain. But they would say, 'John, why don't you just say the words as written?' and I'd say, 'I'll tell you what, I will actually say the words as written when you can actually write intelligent sentences!'" The actor wasn't clear about whether he was fired or quit, but either way, he said his conflicts with the writers were to blame for his departure.

In The Matrix films, one of the more conspicuous absences after the first movie is Tank, played by Marcus Chong. In spite of being one of the few good guys to survive the original film, his character is killed off between movies and doesn't appear in either The Matrix Reloaded or The Matrix Revolutions. The reason Tank dies is that when he was approached to reprise the role, Chong decided on an absolutely bizarre negotiating strategy. 

The writer/director team of the Wachowskis reportedly wanted Chong to return and offered him $250,000 to do so. But, depending on which version of Chong you ask, that was either way too much or not nearly enough. Chong wanted $1 million to reprise the role of Tank, but that was too much for the Wachowskis, and they refused. So, Chong had his lawyer deliver a letter in which the actor said he would return for the sequels either for $500,000 or for free. "I will do it for free," Chong wrote, "because I love our project and want to protect the role and the integrity of the [Wachowskis'] vision." Instead, the Wachowskis decided the franchise could survive without Tank.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, it wasn't the last the Wachowskis heard from Chong. He was arrested for threatening the filmmakers, and he later unsuccessfully sued Warner Bros., AOL Time Warner, and Eon (the Wachowski's production company) for breach of contract, slander, and fraud.

For nine seasons, the late soul singer and actor Isaac Hayes lent his voice to the character Chef on Comedy Central's controversial animated show South Park. Chef would often deliver wisdom to the show's young heroes — wisdom that usually involved breaking into a soul song. But in 2006, Hayes asked be released from his contract. Hayes cited what he called the show's "intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs" as his reason for departing. Hayes, a Scientologist, didn't directly reference the season nine episode "Trapped in the Closet," which criticized Scientology, but many — including South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — assumed that episode was what he was talking about. 

In an official statement from Comedy Central, Stone pointed out what he saw as Hayes' hypocrisy, writing, "Isaac never had a problem with the show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons, or Jews. He got a sudden case of religious sensitivity when it was his religion featured on the show." However, we should point out that Hayes' son has said that his dad had a stroke in 2006, and that the Church of Scientology penned this letter in his name, so perhaps the actor wasn't responsible for the letter.

Regardless, in the season ten premiere "The Return of Chef," Parker and Stone made sure Hayes knew how they felt about his departure. After a hiatus, Chef returns to South Park as a member of the "Super Adventure Club," a blatant stand-in for Scientology. At the end of the episode, Chef is on a rope bridge as it's struck by lightning. The bridge breaks, he catches on fire, falls down a cliffside, and winds up impaled on a branch. Then he's shot and mauled by both a mountain lion and a bear.

By the end of the sitcom Community, almost half of the actors from the original line-up of Greendale Community College's most well-known study group had moved on. But the only character who literally didn't survive the series was Chevy Chase's Pierce Hawthorne. While Pierce had a penchant for faking heart attacks throughout the show in order to get out of trouble, apparently his final one was the real deal. According to Community creator Dan Harmon, the main reason for Hawthorne's death was that Chase and his character were a little bit too much alike. 

The last straw fell during the filming of the season four episode "Advanced Documentary Filmmaking." During filming, Chase apparently went on an angry rant, which included a racial slur. Afterward, NBC and Chase came to the agreement that season four would be Chase's last, though he made a cameo in the season five premiere as a hologram. His death was announced later that season.

Harmon has since gone on record that the rant during season four was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Chase have a history of leaving the set before his filming was completed, but in a 2018 New Yorker interview (via Den of Geek), Harmon and Chase's co-star Donald Glover said the older actor would often make racist cracks at Glover between takes, including suggesting that the audience only found Glover funny because he was Black.