The Real Reason These Actors Left Popular Sci-Fi Shows

It's easy to see why science fiction captivates our imaginations. Who doesn't want to get lost in their favorite sci-fi TV series for a few episodes, traveling around the galaxy, exploring other dimensions, speculating on the endless possibilities of futuristic technology? From Star Trek to Doctor Who to Battlestar Galactica, plenty of sci-fi shows have audiences that span generations, cultures, and nations. Sci-fi can take us somewhere entirely new, yet so too can it bring us into closer contact with the nuances of our own world. No wonder sci-fi fandom is so uniquely passionate.

Perhaps it's because popular sci-fi shows attract such dedicated fans that an actor's departure often inspires strong emotions from these viewers. Saying goodbye to characters you've been watching for ages is always disappointing, of course, but it really hits hard when the character in question has survived intergalactic apocalypse. We're here to examine a few of those sci-fi actors who left their celebrated shows unexpectedly. Why did they leave? What have they done since? These are the stories behind their curtain calls.

After joining the long-running British sci-fi smash Doctor Who in the titular role, Christopher Eccleston found the famous part to be more trouble than it was worth. He ended up leaving the show after only one season, leaving fans wondering why.

"I left only because of those three individuals and the way they were running the show. I loved playing the character," Eccleston explained during a panel discussion at New York Comic-Con in 2019. "I felt I was going to play the Doctor my way and I wasn't going to get involved with those politics and that wasn't workable, so off I went. I became the Invisible Man." Eccleston eventually admitted that the "three individuals" he had professional conflicts with were the showrunner, producer, and co-producer at the time.

Eccleston also faced other obstacles while playing the Doctor. He struggled with an eating disorder while filming, and felt he was treated unfairly by the media. Eventually, he reached a point where he felt that staying in the role was no longer in his best interests.

Before joining the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation as Wesley Crusher, Wil Wheaton had already made a name for himself with roles in films like Stand By Me. Playing Crusher represented a career boost for Wheaton, but after a few seasons, he decided to leave to pursue other aspirations in Hollywood.

"Initially I thought it was a really smart business career move. In some ways it was and in more ways it wasn't. What I wasn't prepared for was how much I was going to miss the people on this stage," Wheaton explained during a panel discussion at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo in 2012. He admitted that he didn't make much of an effort to stay in touch with the rest of the cast after making his exit, and eventually, he felt embarrassed about his decision to leave the show.

"I just felt really ashamed of myself," Wheaton continued. "I felt like I just couldn't go to the set — I felt like I couldn't look them in the eye and that I couldn't invite them to my wedding." But years later, he was able to reconnect with his former co-stars — and unsurprisingly, they had no hard feelings towards him for leaving the show.

Paul Campbell played Billy Keikeya on the 2004 series Battlestar Galactica. For two years, his character serves as the personal assistant to President Laura Roslin. But Campbell did not sign an official contract with the show, and while he was working on Battlestar Galactica, he was still open to new opportunities. At the beginning of season two, he landed a role in a new pilot which took him away from filming for a few episodes. When said pilot didn't work out, he returned to Battlestar Galactica – however, his appearances on the show became sporadic, and the showrunners were getting frustrated with his absences. This resulted in his character being killed off.

"So after that [they] kind of gave me the ultimatum and said sign a contract for five years, or we kind of need to go our separate ways," Campbell said in a 2006 interview, "and I kind of put it off and put it off, then eventually they just said, 'Look, we can tell you're not really committed to the show, and we can't write story lines. So we've decided to kill the character.'"

Aml Ameen played Capheus on the first season of Sense8. Fans were thus surprised when they found out that the same character would be played by actor Toby Onwumere in the second season. It seems that Ameen's departure was a result of some kind of behind-the-scenes conflict with executive producer and director Lana Wachowski. Apparently, the two began clashing during table reads for season two in Berlin. Rather than working out their differences before the cameras began rolling, Ameen and Wachowski continued to butt heads when filming for new episodes began in India. As a result, Ameen was abruptly replaced by a new actor.

It's a mystery as to what actually caused the tensions between Ameen and Wachowski. Perhaps it was merely creative differences and disagreements about the storyline for Ameen's character in season two, or maybe Ameen and Wachowski didn't get along on a personal level, and their strained relationship was beginning to affect the atmosphere on set. Fans may never get a straight answer.

Superhero sci-fi show Misfits was an unexpected hit in the United Kingdom, and helped to launch the careers of several rising stars, including Robert Sheehan. In Misfits, Sheehan starred as Nathan Young for two seasons. Nathan realizes that he is immortal when he wakes up in his own coffin after supposedly falling to his death. But after an exciting character arc, Sheehan decided to quit while he was ahead and take his career in a new direction. 

"I was absolutely quite happy about when I went off, it seemed like a no-brainer at the time, because I was just a restless fella who was trying to go off and do as much different stuff as possible," Sheehan said. "I'd done two good summers with that show, so was wildly impatient to do other stuff." It turned out to be a good career move, proving that Misfits opened up doors for him. After his departure, Sheehan landed a regular role as Darren on Love/Hate, and more recently, the role of fan-favorite Klaus Hargreeves on The Umbrella Academy.

On Babylon 5, Julie Caitlin Brown played Na'Toth, an alien diplomat known for her witty retorts. Although her role is certainly entertaining, Brown only stuck around for five episodes in the first season.

Brown had a rather unique reason behind her decision to leave the show. Although her distinct character design is unforgettable, Brown wasn't a huge fan of it. In fact, she often found herself feeling intensely uncomfortable on set. "My face was very sore from the makeup and I was afraid there would be permanent damage," Brown disclosed in a 2006 interview. Brown further stated that she had not signed a long-term contract for Babylon 5 when she came onto the show, as she wasn't sure how long she wanted to stick with the role. Therefore, it was relatively easy for her to say goodbye to the cast and crew and move on to new projects. Years later, however, she admitted to regretting her early exit. "I wish I would have stayed a little longer, as the character was so interesting," she lamented.

In the mid-2000s, there might not have been any show hotter than "Lost," the sci-fi survivalist thriller co-created by J.J. Abrams. While the show saw plenty of characters come and go over the course of its lengthy run, none were as controversial as Mr. Eko, the drug dealer and thug-turned-priest played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Introduced at the start of the second season, he was killed off in that same year's finale. 

Though many fans have argued about how little of "Lost" was well-planned, series co-creator and writer Damon Lindelof claims at least some of that was due to Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who unexpectedly asked out of the series before the season had wrapped up. According to producer Carlton Cuse, Akinnuoye-Agbaje never felt comfortable in Hawaii — where he had moved to shoot the series — a fact not helped by his arrest by local police landed him in jail. "Hawaii was not his bag," Cuse told USA Today. "Real life intervened and forced us to end the arc of that character much sooner than we would have liked."

In 2010, Akinnuoye-Agbaje was said to have been offered a cameo in the series' epic finale, where he would have returned as the faithful Mr. Eko. But according to E! Online (via Digital Spy), he turned it down, reportedly due to a pay dispute, as the actor was said to have been looking for far more than he was offered.

A child actress who grew up amid the hustle and bustle of Hollywood thanks to her family roots — her ex-stepfather is "Scarface" director Brian De Palma — Willa Holland has had a long and varied career. In the 2000s, she starred in two of the hottest teen dramas, "The O.C." and "Gossip Girl," before graduating to superheroics in The CW's "Arrow." There she starred as Oliver Queen's upstart younger sister Thea, who eventually trains to become a vigilante herself, ultimately taking the identity of Speedy, Green Arrow's partner.

Starring for six seasons in the hit series, Holland was a stalwart of the main cast and an integral part of Arrow's universe. But in the middle of Season 6, audiences were left stunned when Speedy sets off on her own mission with boyfriend Roy Harper, the hero known as Arsenal. This wasn't just a creative way for the writers to shake up the status quo in the lead-up to the final two seasons, but an exit orchestrated by Holland herself.

"Season 6 is the end of her contract," producer and series co-creator Marc Guggenheim told Entertainment Weekly. "Going into season 6, with all of us knowing it was the end of her contract, Willa expressed the desire to move on." The decision was made to not kill off the character though, as producers had a fondness for both Speedy and Holland, and sure enough both returned for a handful of guest appearances over the final seasons.

When "Star Trek: Voyager" first launched, it featured several new alien characters whose presence helped set it apart from previous spin-offs. This included the duo of quirky ship's cook Neelix (Ethan Phillips) and the child-like Ocompan Kes, played by actress Jennifer Lien. But in Season 4, a new cast member joined, the fan-favorite former Borg drone, Seven of Nine, played by Jeri Ryan, and it's no coincidence that her arrival coincided with the departure of Lien. 

"The studio felt that we had too many characters," said series producer Jeri Taylor, in a DVD special feature (relayed by CBR). Because Seven of Nine was going to join the regular cast, someone had to go, and Lien drew the short straw, though it wasn't entirely a random choice. "To my recollection it was a creative decision, and it was a failure of imagination on the writers part," Brannon Braga told an audience at the 2014 VegasCon (per TrekMovie). "We were running out of things to do with Kes," he said, also noting the additional drain on the show's budget thanks to the incoming Ryan. 

Still, the series didn't say goodbye forever, with Kes returning for the Season 6 episode, "Fury." That episode helped wrap up the long-running story of the character's abbreviated life cycle, and gave her a more fitting send-off than she'd seen in Season 4's "The Gift."

In the late '90s, actor Jerry O'Connell starred in "Sliders," a cult favorite that's better than you probably remember. But after its third season, the show moved from Fox to the Sci-Fi Channel, and in a 1998 interview in the Chicago Tribune, the actor expressed excitement about the new direction. "It's great to be on the Sci-Fi Channel," O'Connell told the outlet, "because we can cater to a more intelligent audience."

But as he recollected in a 2016 interview with Yahoo, things didn't turn out the way he'd hoped. "The show was completely different [that year]. We signed on for a thought-provoking, fun take on parallel worlds that explored the effects of slight changes in the way the world works. The last couple seasons, 'Sliders' became more of an action show that focused on our fighting these aliens called the Kromaggs."

But as it happened, O'Connell's displeasure with the show's altered tone coincided with the expiration of his contract. As a result, the actor felt that it was the right time to step away. "I had learned all that I was going to learn from the show after four seasons, and I decided to leave when my contract was up," he told Yahoo. "I was hoping that they would go on with my brother, who joined the cast in Season 4. They got pretty mad and decided to reboot the whole thing and blow it up." 

Audiences seem to love live-action adaptations of popular YA sci-fi novel series, and "The 100" is one of the biggest on the small screen. Running for seven seasons, it launched on The CW in 2014 and centered on a group of people who come back to Earth almost a hundred years after leaving in the wake of nuclear armageddon. With a sprawling ensemble cast, only three actors starred in all seven seasons. Ricky Whittle though could have made it four, were it not for his leaving the show inexplicably after the second season, with his character being killed off in an eye-popping twist.

But the real revelation came in the aftermath of his departure when Whittle revealed behind-the-scenes turmoil in an interview with Afterbuzz TV. "It was my choice to go," he said, claiming there was serious beef with series showrunner Jason Rothenberg. Though he didn't go into the specifics of what sparked the feud, he did detail its effects on him. "He was professionally bullying me, cutting out all the storyline that I was supposed to be doing. Cutting lines, cutting everything out, trying to make my character and myself as insignificant as possible to the point where it was starting to get me down."

To get across just how bad things were between them, Whittle added, "If this was in the playground, it would have got physical ... but I'm an adult and violence isn't going to solve anything." 

"Star Trek" clearly has a long history of writing off major cast members, with "The Next Generation" losing Denise Crosby and Wil Wheaton, Terry Farrell walking away from "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager" dropping Jennifer Lien. But the franchise is still losing stars to this day, with "Star Trek: Discovery" abandoning actor Shazad Latif after two seasons. While his co-stars Jason Isaacs and Michelle Yeoh were never intended to last very long from the get-go, Latif was something a bit different.

In Season 1 he starred as Lieutenant Ash Tyler, while his dual role as the mysterious Klingon Voq was kept a tightly guarded secret, as it sat at the center of the season's major plot twist. But he returned in Season 2 as Tyler, who'd abandoned his Klingon identity, and began a romantic relationship with series lead Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green). But the character said a surprising goodbye in the Season 2 finale, leaving to head up the covert intelligence agency known as Section 31. This isn't a case of Latif requesting off of the series though — quite the opposite in fact — and in a 2022 interview the actor revealed just what happened.

According to a report from TrekMovie, producers had been planning a spin-off series focused on Section 31 to star Latif alongside superstar Michelle Yeoh. But because of Yeoh's limited availability, the series has yet to get off the ground, and Latif has been left in limbo.