19 TV Character Deaths That Were So Surprising, These Actors In The Shows Were Genuinely Shocked, Too
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🚨 There are MASSIVE spoilers ahead — including for recent episodes of Succession! 🚨
1.First, on How I Met Your Mother, Jason Segel had no idea Marshall's dad was going to die until they filmed the episode, so the scene between him and Alyson Hannigan includes his honest, and immediate, reaction to the news.
Creator Carter Bays said that the only thing Jason knew going into the scene was that Lily's final line ended with "it." Carter recalled watching Alyson and Jason film the moment, saying, "What Jason and Alyson were going through was so unbearably real."
2.The cast of Grey's Anatomy Season 8 had no idea that Lexie was going to die during the plane crash until the table read for the season finale. Sarah Drew said everyone was "weeping" when they found out in real time.
"We were all weeping at the table read because nobody knew it was coming," Sarah explained to E! News. "There were rumors that maybe somebody might die, but nobody [except Chyler] knew who."
3.The How to Get Away with Murder cast was kept in the dark as long as possible before it was revealed that Wes was the character who died in Season 3. In fact, Karla Souza was crying so hard when she found out that they had to stop the scene they were currently filming.
"I couldn't perform for, like, an hour. I was sobbing," Karla recalled to Entertainment Weekly. "We were shooting a scene in the lecture hall, and I couldn’t stop crying. I knew it was a problem, because people were asking me what's wrong. They stopped filming, and there's me crying, and Aja [Naomi King] started crying, and hair and makeup people started crying."
4.Sarah Snook found out about Logan's death happening in only the third episode of the final season of Succession in a Zoom meeting. She was shocked it was happening so early in Season 4, and then was impressed with the "huge swing" creator and writer Jesse Armstrong was taking with it.
Speaking about what was happening in the cast's group chat after news of Logan's death was revealed to them, Sarah explained, "A lot of, 'Whoa, what’s gonna happen? What’s this season going to look like? How many episodes are we doing? Do we just stop after four episodes? How do we proceed? The king is gone.'"
5.The M*A*S*H creators and writers famously withheld the script page that detailed Henry Blake's death from the cast until they were filming. The cast shot the whole episode, thought they were done, and were then told they had a final scene to do.
"Gene and I took the cast over to one side and sat them down and said, 'Look, we're going to do something that you don't know about,'" co-creator Larry Gelbart recalled. "I had this manila envelope with the last page in it that they'd never seen. ... It's not often in your life that you see people stunned. ... They really could not believe what was on the page."
6.Craig Sheffer was originally told he would be on One Tree Hill "as long as the show runs," so he was stunned when Keith was killed off in Season 3. He revealed on the Drama Queens podcast it happened because the creator threatened to fire him after he took time off to shoot an independent film and spend time with his family.
He continued, saying, "We do know that production schedules can get crazy, but for simple things, it was so about control. I showed up as this character. I had a teeny bit of facial hair, I wore my boots outside my pants like I always did. Gradually, Mark Schwahn…they threatened to fire me about my boots."
7.Veronica Mars notably returned for a long-awaited Season 4, only for Logan Echolls to be killed in the final minutes of the revival season. Kristen Bell admitted that she was "taken aback" when she first found out about the twist.
"My first thought was, [Is Rob] going to be safe? Because people will have very strong feelings about this," Kristen recalled to TVLine at the time. "And I did not think that anyone would see it coming. Because we are not a show that kills [major characters] very often."
8.Jennifer Coolidge loved playing Tanya in The White Lotus so much that she said she "wasn't happy" when she found out her character would be the big death in Season 2. However, she trusted creator Mike White that it was the right decision for the series.
Jennifer told Variety, "Mike White’s a genius — I knew my ending would be good. When he told me I was going to die, he didn’t have the ending yet, he hadn’t completely orchestrated it out. I was kind of bummed, but Mike knows how to tell a story better than anyone I know, so I knew I just had to trust it."
9.On Orange Is the New Black, most of the cast learned of Poussey's tragic death when they got the script for the episode and promptly started weeping. Adrienne C. Moore, who played Cindy, recalled, "I cried [when I read the script] and I really cried at the very last episode. That one moment when she’s by herself."
While most of the cast found out when scripts were delivered, Samira Wiley knew her character was going to die for almost an entire year.
10.In the Game of Thrones series finale, Daenerys Targaryen's death was a sudden one — so much so, that at the table read for the episode, Kit Harington audibly gasped, locked eyes with Emila Clarke, and started getting emotional when he read it for the first time.
In the HBO documentary Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, you can see the very moment when Kit realizes what Jon has done, and Emilia, who knew it was coming, just shook her head, "Yes," and slouched down in her chair.
11.Villanelle's last-minute death in the Killing Eve series finale was met with very mixed reactions — most pointing out that, once again, an LGBTQ+ character died for no reason — and Jodie Comer said that she doesn't "like thinking of [Villanelle] floating around the River Thames" and she "did anticipate a mixed reaction" from fans after learning what would happen.
"I think she crawled out," Jodie joked in a live podcast with Happy Sad Confused. She said she had her "moment of mourning on set" over saying goodbye to Villanelle, saying, "The scene on the boat, at the wedding, when Sandra [Oh]'s dancing in the crowd, and I was off camera, just watching her dance, and it hit me in that moment where I was so emotional."
12.Julie Benz, who played Rita on Dexter, said she "started having a panic attack" when she found out that her character would die on the show. She only found out three days before the rest of the cast found out.
Julie was called into a meeting with the producers of the show, and that's when she realized Rita was likely dying. She recalled feeling "so vulnerable" standing there getting the news, and she "bawled" in the room even though she tried hard not to.
13.While Jackie's death in Yellowjackets was something the cast knew from the very beginning, how she died was a surprise to Sophie Nélisse. She wasn't expecting Jackie's death to come after a huge fight between her and Shauna, so the guilt would, in turn, become such an important part of Shauna's arc moving forward, especially in Season 2.
"It hit us both when we got on set, because Ella [Purnell] and I had grown so close during the first season. We were like best friends, and very close to our characters," Sophie told the Hollywood Reporter. "I put Ella on such a pedestal. She was kind of my bigger sister, who has a little more life experience, and could be a guide and someone I looked up to. When we shot the [finale], I was like, 'Oh, shit, you’re not going to be there next season.'"
14.The Sopranos delivered one of the biggest deaths in TV history when Adriana was killed in "Long Term Parking." Drea de Matteo knew her character was likely going to die, but the rest of the cast, and even the crew, took it "like a death in the family."
"David [Chase, the creator] came to me and said, 'I'm going to shoot this two ways: I'm going to kill you, and I'm going to let you live. And nobody's going to know until it airs,'" Drea recalled. "I'm like, 'Okay, I'm dying, for sure, but why shoot it two ways?' He said one reason was he wasn't sure what he wanted to do, and the other was to keep confidentiality on set. He would go that far to divert the crew from being able to leak anything."
15.The 100 became known for the often awful, and sudden, ways characters died, and Bellamy's unnecessary death in the final season was one of them. After the episode, Eliza Taylor, who played Clarke, said that she didn't "necessarily agree with Bellamy's death, or a lot of other deaths."
She added, "But it’s just the nature of the beast. Our show doesn’t shy away from killing off its loved ones." In the same interview with the LA Times, Eliza also looked back at Lexa's shocking death, saying, "And this one wasn't handled as delicately as it should have been," alluding to the fan outrage and the Bury Your Gays trope.
16.Ryan Hurst was so heartbroken when Sons of Anarchy decided to kill off his character Opie that one day, at 4 a.m., he looked online to see if there were any acting books that could help him cope with saying goodbye to a character.
Eventually, Charlie Hunnam invited Ryan and a bunch of the cast over to his house, they hung out, and ceremoniously cut off Ryan's beard that he had grown for the character as a "final farewell." They all started crying while cutting off Ryan's beard with a literal samurai sword.
17.Teen Wolf elected to come back with a movie — instead of a seventh season — and it ended with Derek sacrificing himself to save his son and Beacon Hills. Tyler Posey said it was "emotional" reading about Derek's death in the script.
He continued, saying, "It's super emotional. Tyler Hoechlin is somebody that I really love, and as much as I am an actor and I know that there's separateness from our characters and our human selves, it's emotional reading that."
18.The Walking Dead shocked fans when they killed Andrea in Season 3, considering she's a main character in the comic books. In fact, Laurie Holden, who played Andrea, was stunned when it happened because she reportedly had an eight-season deal with the show.
At a Walking Dead fan convention, she reportedly told the crowd, "Well, I had an eight-year deal. I was supposed to be there until the end. I was supposed to end up with Rick. I was supposed to save Woodbury on a horse, and I was buying a house in Atlanta."
19.And finally, The Originals heartbreakingly killed Hayley during the final season, and Yusuf Gatewood, who played Vincent, had no idea it was happening until he got to the read-through. In fact, he thought it wasn't real because there had been rumors on the internet after a writers' room leak revealed that Hayley was going to die.
"I was reading it, and I was like, No! This...can't be really what it is," Yusuf said in an interview with TVLine at the time. "It was interesting to find out, and just one of those things that happens in this series where you're just gut-punched every once in a while, and something happens that you definitely don't expect to happen."
