In honor of Constance Wu and her public display of annoyance at Fresh off the Boat being renewed, what have actors done to try and get out of a show before their contract ends?

The first thing that comes to mind is Jessica Biel posing topless in a magazine when she was 17 to try and get out of 7th Heaven.

Charlie Sheen nearly killed himself with drugs.

Katherine Heigl, Grey's Anatomy, publicly claimed the writing was good enough for her character.

I don't know why ABC couldn't have worked with Constance Wu. If she wanted to pursue another gig, ABC and the actress could have worked a new deal. Less airtime for her character, but more on the other characters. The show is not as strong as Blackish, nor is she as necessary to be on every episode of the show as say Tracee Ellis Ross would be for Blackish.

Mark Hamill was cast as the oldest son in “Eight is Enough”. He filmed the pilot in the spring of 1976, and ABC declined to pick it up for the fall season. He then went off to film “Star Wars”. In late fall, ABC picked up EIE as a midseason replacement. All the actors were still under contract.

Mark, feeling “Star Wars” would be successful, tried to get out of his contract. ABC and Lorimar refused. Driving back from his meeting with the TV executives, he drove his car off the road and wound up needing extensive plastic surgery. With filming for EIE just weeks away, they had to recast. Some have speculated that Mark’s accident was deliberate. Mark himself said he was very angry and perhaps subconsciously got into the accident.

Mark Hamill was cast as the oldest son in “Eight is Enough”. He filmed the pilot in the spring of 1976, and ABC declined to pick it up for the fall season. He then went off to film “Star Wars”. In late fall, ABC picked up EIE as a midseason replacement. All the actors were still under contract.

Mark, feeling “Star Wars” would be successful, tried to get out of his contract. ABC and Lorimar refused. Driving back from his meeting with the TV executives, he drove his car off the road and wound up needing extensive plastic surgery. With filming for EIE just weeks away, they had to recast. Some have speculated that Mark’s accident was deliberate. Mark himself said he was very angry and perhaps subconsciously got into the accident.

I'm sorry I have a very hard time believing Hamill's accident was "deliberate". He could've been killed for crying out loud! I just don't believe anybody would do that to get out of doing a TV show.

Ed.

I'm sorry I have a very hard time believing Hamill's accident was "deliberate". He could've been killed for crying out loud! I just don't believe anybody would do that to get out of doing a TV show.

Ed.
Plus nobody knew Star Wars was going to be as big as it was at that time.

Can we count game shows? Richard Dawson infamously sat through his last season on Match Game deliberately sulking on camera because he wouldn't be released out of his contract to do Family Feud.

Plus nobody knew Star Wars was going to be as big as it was at that time.

Star Wars had great buzz before it came out - people were speculating it was going to be big. If Mark didn’t think so, then why did he try to get out of his contract?

I thought this was an interesting quote from William Blinn, executive producer of “Eight is Enough”: “I liked Mark a lot, we got along well. I remember at the end of the pilot I said, “Where are you off to now, what’s next?” And he said, ‘I’m going to England to do some science-fiction thing, and I’m getting a chance to work with Alec Guinness.’ Then when we came back, he’d done Star Wars, which was going to be huge. Then ABC picked up the series. And here he is, Star Wars is about to come out, with all that word of mouth, and Mark was committed to this series that no one believed was going to rival Eugene O’Neill in terms of American drama. Mark asked for his release, but Lorimar said no, and I was the one who had to tell him. I said, ‘They’re in a profit business and you’re hot commercially, so they’re not going to let you out. You’ll just have to make the best of it.’ He stormed out of my office, pissed off, not at me but at the situation., and he went off and got in a car crash and put his face through the windshield. Now I don’t know what the power of the unconscious mind is, but at that point we couldn’t use him.”

- From the book Written out of Television

I wish I had the quote from Mark himself from an EW story where he said he was pissed off when he was driving home from that meeting and that probably contributed to his accident. I don’t think it was consciously deliberate. But when you’re driving around angry, it can lead to unfortunate consequences.

One can speculate but I honestly believe that Roseanne deliberately did what she did to get out of the awful reboot.

One can speculate but I honestly believe that Roseanne deliberately did what she did to get out of the awful reboot.

I disagree; something tells me otherwise. She was executive producer of the reboot, so she had some push and pull over the creative aspects of the show. Her tweet was intentional, despite being under the influence of drugs, but I think the consequences were unintentional, she didn't do it deliberately to get off the show or get cancelled; she seemed to be happy on it. When it was cancelled, she seemed to be pissed to hand over the rights to her cast mates (despite doing it anyway to save people's livelihood) and upset that her character was killed off on the spin-off.

Her actions were a result of her being careless and reckless and having no regard for others and the consequences.

I could've sworn that I hard that Sally Field tried use her pregnancy as an excuse (I don't know for sure if she deliberately set out to get pregnant or it was just happenstance) to get out of The Flying Nun.