22 Actors Who Quit a Good Thing Too Soon

Being an actor — or having any career, really — requires a little bit of ESP. Like, who could have possibly predicted that one of the most popular television franchises of the decade would revolve around an asshole physicist? Without a keen eye for spotting the trends that haven’t happened yet, you might drift aimlessly from pilot to pilot without ever striking oil — or even worse, walk away from a project right before it becomes a huge success, never to be replicated again.

In fact, it’s happened to plenty of actors. Sometimes, it was just a tragic stroke of bad luck, but others — as implied by user wlane13’s question to r/AskReddit — they start thinking they’re hot shit, decide to become action heroes or whatever, and promptly disappear while everyone who stuck around flourishes. They then asked more specifically, “What actor or actress stupidly left a movie franchise or TV series, thinking they were too good for it, only to be never popular again?” and Reddit reveled in the schadenfreude.