Here's How TV Shows Tell Actors Their Character's Going To Die, And It's More Brutal Than I Thought

Just like most people have a cancelled show they wish they could revive, I reckon loads of us have a TV death we’ve never quite gotten over. 

Mine is Edie Britt’s horrific Desperate Housewives demise, which reportedly reflected the actor’s real-life relationship with the show’s creator Marc Cherry. 

So, when a listener to insider showbiz podcast The Rest Is Entertainment asked the hosts Marina Hyde and Richard Osman how TV shows tell actors their character is being killed off, I shouldn’t have been shocked to learn it can be somewhat abrupt.

How is it done?

On a longer-running show, Richard Osman said, there’ll usually be an element of “respect”, in which case an actor will be told of their character’s fate in advance. 

Journalist Marina Hyde said that in these cases, some actors are even given a say in their characters’ deaths.

However, she added: “It seems like it goes without saying that you should tell them before they find out another way, but quite often that hasn’t happened.”

She reminded her co-host of an infamous recording of Game Of Thrones table read, in which the actor Conleth Hill, who played Lord Varys, discovered his character was getting killed off right there at the first script run-through. 

He threw his script when he learned about the development, later saying the reveal left him “inconsolable”.

This type of harsh, sudden disclosure happens “much more often than you think,” Marina later added.

Right... anything else?

“In other cases, you might have an actor who is, shall we say, not that discreet,” Marina added (some artists, like Tom Holland, are known for their multiple accidental blurt-outs).

“You don’t really want to tell them because they can’t keep a spoiler,” she continued.

She speculated that Joe Pantoliano, who played Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, was a potential example of that ― he also found out his character was being killed off at a table read.

“When shows become very, very big... you can’t necessarily trust people not to say something,” the journalist claimed. 

She ended by saying: “If they really don’t like you, they’ll make sure you die in a way that ― even by the standards of, like, stretching all fictional tropes, you can never come back.” 

I reckon that sounds about right for my much-mourned Edie ― I just hope Nicollette had a bit more of a warning than other actors.