Fan Favorites Who Were Originally Supposed To Die

Killing off a fan favorite character is a great way for a writer to raise dramatic stakes without working too hard, and audiences will generally let them get away with it. Game of Thrones is one of the most popular shows on television despite being absolutely notorious for offing characters just as fans are getting invested in them, and it's debatable whether it's even the worst offender in this regard (we're looking at you, The Walking Dead).

But sometimes, for a multitude of reasons, a character will be headed for the chopping block only to get a last-minute reprieve. These are the times when writers almost broke our hearts, but inexplicably chose not to—and fan favorite characters who were originally supposed to die got to live on.

Breaking Bad accomplished expertly what no other television series has even attempted: it began with a likable protagonist and, over the course of five seasons, slowly but surely turned him into a villain. While the show was always focused squarely on the journey of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), later seasons also dealt with extremely sticky moral situations faced by Walter's wife Skyler (Anna Gunn), brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris), and—especially—young partner in crime Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).

Jesse became perhaps the show's most important secondary character, slowly falling into moral despair in a way that Walter never allowed himself to and giving Walter both a foil and a focus for his misplaced paternal instincts. But originally, the character of Jesse was to serve pretty much one purpose: his grisly death at the end of the season would have given Walter his first big moral conundrum, and accelerated his transformation to ruthless drug lord. Legend has it that the 2007-2008 writers' strike, which shortened Breaking Bad's first season, saved Jesse when plot adjustments had to be made—but the strike really just gave creator Vince Gilligan time to reconsider. "In a sense, [the strike] didn't save him, because I knew by episode two," Gilligan once explained. "Everybody knew just how good [Aaron Paul is], and a pleasure to work with, and it became pretty clear early on that that would be a huge, colossal mistake to kill off Jesse."

Perhaps nobody benefited more from the narrative aimlessness of Lost than its star, Matthew Fox, who played primary protagonist Jack Shephard for its entire run. While it may be strange to think that the series' lead was ever in danger of an early exit, we are talking about J.J. Abrams, who as the show's executive producer had a brilliant idea: to set up the entire cast in the first episode, including the introduction of the clear, obvious lead—only to have him die by episode's end.

Abrams reasoned this would keep audiences on their toes, and even attempted to pull a Scream by casting a well-known actor in the role of Jack—Michael Keaton, who was actually thrilled with the idea of getting a meaty network TV role without having to actually commit to the entire series. In fact, Keaton turned down the role only when it was decided that the character would be kept alive. As he explained to Access Hollywood, "An hour show every week... I've got stuff to do, I've got a life to lead. When would I fish?"

Harrison Ford has long been one of Hollywood's most famously cantankerous stars. He's never seemed particularly thrilled to be one the most popular actors in the world, often appearing uncomfortable in interviews and seeming ambivalent toward much of his work—including perhaps his most famous role, Han Solo in the Star Wars series, whom he once referred to on David Letterman's talk show as "Ham Yo-Yo." It seems like a minor miracle that Ford was convinced to return to give the character a proper sendoff in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but it almost wasn't necessary—Ford was eager for Solo to die during the original series, which he almost did more than once.

For starters, Solo was left ambiguously frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back specifically because nobody knew whether Ford would come back for a third installment. When he was coaxed to return, he straight up lobbied for Solo's death in Return of the Jedi. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Ford explained: "I asked [George Lucas] to ask the writers to kill me off because I thought that it would be good that the character who appeared to have not so much of a complex interweaving with the theme of the Force... if he sacrificed himself in some noble way." Of course, the character finally did meet his end in The Force Awakens—and if any of the many fan theories are correct, he may have offered just the noble sacrifice that Ford always wanted.

Fans of the HBO Southern Gothic vampire series True Blood had no trouble identifying their favorite character early: Lafayette Reynolds (the late Nelsan Ellis), the surly, perpetually lovelorn and deadpan hilarious short-order cook whose boyfriends keep meeting supernaturally violent ends. The character was a mainstay of the series' seven seasons—but at the beginning of the second season, fans who'd read the source novels had reason to be very nervous about Lafayette's fate.

True Blood's first season follows the first novel in Charlaine Harris' Southern Vampire Mysteries series, Dead Until Dark, quite closely, and season two's opener would be concluding this storyline. The novel ends with Sookie finding Lafayette's body in a cop car in the parking lot of Merlotte's—so fans were relieved when the TV version of events, which played out pretty much the exact same way, swapped the corpse out with a completely different character and let Lafayette avoid his literary fate. Tragically, real life would not be so kind. Earlier this year, Ellis passed away due to complications from heart failure at the age of 39.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has developed into a fine series and a worthy addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe—but it started off a little rocky, and many were convinced before the series even premiered that it shouldn't actually exist. Teasers revealed that Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) would be returning as the show's star—which had some fans of the beloved character feeling a bit cheated, given the epic death scene he'd been given in 2012's The Avengers.

Director Joss Whedon subsequently revealed in a Mental Floss interview that Coulson's death was indeed meant to be permanent, saying, "The Coulson thing was, I think, a little anomalous just because that really came from the television division, which is sort of considered to be its own subsection of the Marvel universe." He admitted that he felt Marvel's decision to bring Coulson back from the dead "took some of the punch" from his death scene, but it apparently wasn't offensive enough to keep him from co-creating Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and serving as an executive producer on the series.

Nobody expected 1982's First Blood—which is more of a psychological thriller than anything else—to spawn an action franchise. The film's protagonist, John J. Rambo, is a damaged Vietnam vet who fights only reluctantly when provoked (which he is, mercilessly), in contrast to the one-man army he would become in the sequels. Of course, none of these sequels would even have been possible if director Ted Kotcheff hadn't let star Sylvester Stallone talk him into deviating from the screenplay, in which Rambo dies at the end.

Just like the novel from which it was adapted, the film was originally to end with Rambo committing suicide, and the scene was even filmed. But speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Kotcheff said that immediately afterward, Stallone suggested he try shooting it another way. "He said, 'You know, Ted, we put this character through so much," the director recalled. "The police abuse him. He's pursued endlessly. Dogs are sent after him. He jumps off cliffs. He runs through freezing water. He's shot in the arm and he has to sew it up himself. All this, and now we're gonna kill him?'" Kotcheff had to concede that his star "had a point," and they immediately shot the ending that made the final cut of the film, in which Rambo gives himself up. Producers protested, but Kotcheff countered that he'd just saved them a ton of money by shooting the happy ending he knew test audiences would want, which was tough to disagree with.

Iron Man 3 was the first film in the series not directed by Jon Favreau, who also portrays Tony's Stark's bodyguard Happy Hogan. While Hogan's biggest worries at the moment are cataloging weird Avengers tech and being perpetually annoyed by a motor-mouthed teen hero, he spent most of Iron Man 3 in a coma after being seriously injured by an exploding human bomb. Fans were, well, happy to see him recover by the film's end—but director Shane Black almost made a much darker choice. As the movie's original storyboards revealed, Hogan was actually supposed to die in the explosion.

Black has never revealed what caused him to change his mind—perhaps he just couldn't bring himself to do in the lovable character, or perhaps the Marvel Men in Black knocked on his trailer door to tell him it wasn't Happy's time yet. Either way, as a newcomer to Marvel's most popular solo franchise, it was probably a good idea not to kill off the character played by the guy who actually established the series—and by extension, the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Leonard Nimoy had a famously complicated relationship with his most famous character, as evidenced by his 1975 book I Am Not Spock and its 1995 follow-up, I Am Spock. He famously told the producers of 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture that he was only going to play Spock this one last time, and he was so emphatic on this point that the character wasn't even included in the first draft of the screenplay for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But then, screenwriter Jack B. Sowards had an idea: why not offer to give Spock an epic death scene, and kill him off for good?

The idea proved enticing to Nimoy, and it was made even more so by the fact that the death would occur early in the movie, giving audiences a shock. But, according to Huffington Post columnist and Sowards' friend Robert Elisberg, Sowards had faked Nimoy out: "as Jack continued along with the draft, he did what he had always planned to do from the first—he shifted things around. Spock's death was still there, but...now, it was about a third of the way into the script." Subsequent rewrites pushed the death scene farther and farther back, "and then, finally, [he] had pushed the death scene all the way to the end of the movie." Nimoy approved each draft, and in fact loved Sowards' writing so much that it made him want to keep playing Spock—which he did, for another 27 years.