10 Actors Who Really Didn’t Want Their Characters To Be Killed Off

Find out what these stars had to say about their roles…

The producers behind The Walking Dead never hesitated to kill off fan-favorite characters and when they considered offing Melissa McBride’s character Carol, she knew she had to say something. Melissa ended up pleading her case — and in the end, her character was spared.

“There was that time where they were gonna kill her. I asked to speak to somebody to tell them what I thought of Carol, because nobody had asked me at that point. I’m like, ‘Here’s who she is to me, just at least let me tell you that much and if you still want to kill her, fine’ — but it was important for me to speak for her,” Melissa shared at Comic-Con.

She continued, “I still to this day don’t know what saved her. I’ve heard different stories, but I don’t know — but I’m grateful, for whatever reason.”

Jeffrey Dean Morgan loved his time on Grey’s Anatomy — so much so that he begged not to be killed off. When Jeffrey started to notice that his character arc was headed in that direction, he says he tried to convince Shonda Rhimes to let him stay on the show.

“That’s the one time I saw my death coming and was trying everything I could do to get out of that death. That character Denny and that love story with Izzie kind of took the world by storm. I knew how f–king lucky I was to be there, and I was like, ‘Please don’t kill me! I will do anything!’…and I did, I did. I begged her,” he shared on an episode of Hot Ones.

While Jeffrey was ultimately killed off, he did make guest appearances later on in hallucinations and dreams.

When Ella Purnell was cast on Yellowjackets, she only signed a one year contract. While she was at first excited about the flexibility, she grew to love her character Jackie Taylor and didn’t want to leave the show. Unfortunately, producers had plans to kill off Jackie and even though Ella asked to stay, writers couldn’t make it happen.

“I was like, ‘It’s only a one-year deal. I’m not locked into a seven-year contract.’ So, at the time, that seemed really appealing. And then when we started filming — I didn’t want to die. I tried to convince the writers to keep me on the show a bit longer. So they thought about it, and then they called me and were like, ‘She’s got to go. We tried. We did our best,’” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

Jeremy Renner was once slated to take over Tom Cruise’s role in the Mission: Impossible franchise but ended up becoming too busy with his role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, his role as IMF agent William Brandt was going to be killed off in Mission: Impossible – Fallout but Jeremy refused to let it happen.

“I had this whole idea that the movie would start with the death of a team member,” director Christopher McQuarrie told Empire. “So I said to Renner, ‘Hey listen, I have this idea for an opening sequence where you sacrifice yourself to save the team, and that the mission-gone-wrong not only involves losing the plutonium, but involves the death of a team member.’ And Jeremy was like, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ …He was smart not to take the short paycheck for three days of work and getting blown up.”

Sean Bean has long had bad luck with his characters getting killed in shows and movies. When it came to his role as Douglas Bennett in the WWII drama World On Fire, Sean played it safe and talked to creator Peter Bowker. While discussing the role, Sean made sure his character wouldn’t be killed.

“It was a telephone conversation and I said, ‘I don’t die in this one, do I,’ and he said, ‘No, no you’ll be fine. You’re alright,’” Sean shared.

During his run on Game of Thrones, Ian McElhinney became known as Ser Barristan Selmy, one of Daenerys Targaryen’s most trusted advisors. But during season 5, Ian’s character was surprisingly killed off — different from what was depicted in the books. Ian says he spoke to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss about keeping his character around but they turned him down.

“I did talk to them about it. I gave some arguments of my own why I thought Barristan was kind of important in Daenerys’ story, important enough that he should stay in Daenerys’ story, and he didn’t,” Ian told The Huffington Post. “It’s their call at the end of the day, so you kind of have to accept whatever the decision is, but I did certainly sort of ask them further about it.”

Early in her career, Queen Latifah experienced a lot of loss when it came to her on screen roles. After her characters were killed off multiple times, she finally added to her contracts that her characters could not be killed on screen.

“You know, what happened at the beginning of my career…My characters died in the movies and apparently I died my ass off,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, if I keep dying in these movies, I can’t do a sequel.’ Henceforth, we kind of threw [the clause] in there…I was like, ‘No more dying. No more getting shot up by 300 bullets in this car.’”

When Matthew Lintz’s character Henry was killed during season 9 of The Walking Dead, fans were shocked — and the actor was too. While his character arc had been building up over the course of the season, he was unexpectedly killed, along with several other characters. Looking back, Matthew says he wanted to stay longer and thought his character had more to say.

“I think every character that is [eliminated] is always a missed opportunity — you can always take them down different paths, so to speak. I think Henry definitely had a lot of story to tell, but people have to [pass], and I think Henry was a good shock factor to a lot of fans. You know, I think Henry did have more to give, but sadly he was [taken out],” he told Metro.co.uk.

Dennis Haysbert portrayed President David Palmer on 24 until he was suddenly killed off early on in season 5. Dennis later explained that he really didn’t want his character to die and held off on shooting the scene for as long as possible.

“I just refused to do it for a great many months. Then they sent one of my friends, who’s now the show’s runner, and he convinced me to do it because they needed to launch the season. They said they really couldn’t do it without me…If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t do it,” he told Digital Spy in 2007.

Rita Simons starred as Roxy Mitchell on EastEnders for a decade but when writers wanted to kill her character off, she refused. Looking back, Rita says before the scene was filmed where Roxy and her sister were supposed to drown, an executive told her that many people didn’t want her character to die. He added that if she had any desire to return to the show, she needed to portray the scene as if she survived.

“I got pulled aside a couple of days before filming the final scene by an exec…who said to me, ‘There are a lot of people upstairs who don’t agree with this’…They said, ‘If you want any chance at ever bringing Roxy back, you have to refuse to die.’…Now is the time to say I played that scene as if I was holding my breath. Go back and watch it online and you will see next to nothing of me at all…I didn’t let anyone film me jump in the pool, so no one saw me drown,” she told The Sun.