19 TV Character Deaths That Were So Surprising, These Actors In The Shows Were Genuinely Shocked, Too

“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.”

“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.”

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.'”

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

“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.” 

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.

“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.'”

“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 pert the crew from being able to leak anything.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

“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.”