10 Actors Who Returned To A TV Series After Leaving – TVLine

Unlike movies, the fun thing about television is that TV shows can, hypothetically, go on forever. If a show has a solid-enough engine and showrunners who are committed to the stories they’re telling, TV is made to be endlessly renewable. As fans, we become attached to the people on our favorite long-running shows, finding comfort in the way their weekly installments give our own lives a sort of structure and routine.

Behind the scenes, though, that repeatability can be a curse just as much as it is a blessing. Actors typically sign television contracts for several years at a time; after all, everyone loves job security, and part of the fun of television is getting to explore a character with much greater depth than you would in a film. As those years stretch on, however, artists get restless and want to move on. Sometimes, an actor is forced out for other reasons; sometimes the story demands it, and sometimes the budget is to blame.

In other words, fans love to follow the drama that goes on when the cameras aren’t rolling, and when a major actor leaves a major show, it can become major news. A few years later, though, lots of actors make the time to stop in on their old haunts, reviving their characters for one more go … even though they may have sworn they never would. Read on for the stories of 10 actors who have returned to their shows after leaving.

It can be hard enough to keep a cast engaged when your show stretches past the two-decade mark, but in the early years of “Grey’s Anatomy” — back when it was a flashy new sensation rather than a long-running staple — fans were just as fascinated by stories of the behind-the-scenes chaos on the “Grey’s” set. One of its earliest, biggest scandals occurred in 2007, when Isaiah Washington was fired for using a homophobic slur against fellow castmate T.R. Knight. Creator and showrunner Shonda Rhimes told The Hollywood Reporter that she didn’t expect the show would be able to recover, remembering, “I mean, that was the thing we thought was going to kill the show. And it’s funny, every ‘Grey’s’ actor I talk to who was there during that time is still traumatized by that incident. People still talk about it.”

Though he got the chop in Season 3, Washington nevertheless returned as Dr. Preston Burke in a Season 10 episode meant to help send off Sandra Oh’s character, Dr. Cristina Yang. Burke, we learned, had been running a hospital in Switzerland, and he tried to poach Cristina away from Seattle by offering her a job. Oh, it seems, was instrumental in getting Washington back in Rhimes’ good graces. “She refused to leave the show without my return, and she won that battle,” Washington wrote on X in 2025. “I love me some Sandra Oh!”

Before she was cast as the rebellious teenager Jenny Humphrey on the smash-hit CW series “Gossip Girl,” Taylor Momsen was a child star. She was perhaps best known as Cindy Lou Who in the live-action adaptation of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” meaning that by the time her “Gossip Girl” tenure stretched on, Momsen was quite ready to hang up her hat. She’d long since realized that she was more interested in music, anyway, and her band, The Pretty Reckless, was doing pretty well.

“I woke up one morning and went, ‘Wait a second. I don’t have to do this? I don’t have to do this other job? I can just play in my band and tour, and write songs? I can just do that?” Momsen remembered thinking on an episode of co-star Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast. Of course, there was that pesky contract to worry about. “They went, ‘Well, we can’t let you out of your deal, but we can write you out of the show,'” Momsen said. The only caveat was that she wouldn’t be able to act in any other projects. That was fine with her.

Her departure from “Gossip Girl” caused a minor media firestorm, and her co-star Connor Paolo blasted critics of her decision, even hinting at Jenny’s return. Ultimately, though, Momsen wouldn’t reappear on the show until its 2012 series finale, when Jenny showed up at Blair and Chuck’s wedding.

Everything on “The Office” orbited around Steve Carell’s hapless, well-meaning, incompetent paper company boss Michael Scott, but Carell ultimately left the show after Season 7. Though it was initially positioned in the media as simply time for him to step away, production sources later revealed in a book called “The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s” (via IndieWire) that Carell’s exit was the result of contract negotiations that turned sour. Carell had been willing to stay on longer, but NBC simply didn’t bother to renegotiate his contract when it expired. Casting director Allison Jones recalled, “NBC, for whatever reason, wouldn’t make a deal with him. Somebody didn’t pay him enough. It was absolutely asinine. I don’t know what else to say about that. Just asinine.”

Though Carell repeatedly insisted that he wouldn’t return to the show, Michael did indeed attend the wedding of Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) and Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey) that formed the centerpiece of the series finale. “We just thought it would be fun if it were to be a surprise,” Carell told E! News. “We lied a lot.” And while we’re in the business of bringing people back, here are 10 “The Office” characters we’d like to see on Peacock’s spinoff “The Paper.”

How well do you remember the two-hour premiere of ABC’s “Lost”? If you’ve retained anything from the knockout show’s first season, you probably remember Harold Perrineau’s character Michael and his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley). These are two characters who became increasingly important as that first season went on. Unfortunately, the show’s slow timeline meant Kelley aged much faster than his character, and Perrineau was ultimately written out, too. “It became pretty clear that I was the Black guy. Daniel [Dae Kim] was the Asian guy. And then you had Jack and Kate and Sawyer,” Perrineau told Maureen Ryan for her book “Burn It Down” (via Vanity Fair).

“I was f***ed up about it. I was like, ‘Oh, I just got fired, I think,'” Perrineau recalled. At the time, he gave an interview about his exit and complained openly about the fact that Michael and Walt didn’t get to close the book on their storyline. “Walt just winds up being another fatherless child,” he said. “It plays into a really big, weird stereotype and, being a Black person myself, that wasn’t so interesting.”

Perrineau did return to the island several times after Season 2, including in the show’s “flash-sideways” final season. “I’m never going to regret advocating for the character and for myself, as an actor,” Perrineau told BuzzFeed. “Let the chips fall where they fall.”

Lauren Cohan played Maggie on “The Walking Dead,” and she was one of the show’s best characters; she’s a headstrong survivor who knows her way around a weapon. She joined in Season 2 and quickly became one of the show’s main characters, thanks in part to her romance with Glenn (Steven Yeun) and her above-average zombie-killing skills. 

After Season 8, news broke that Cohan might not be returning for the show’s ninth season. Sources reported that she was trying to negotiate so that she was paid the same as male co-stars like Andrew Lincoln and Norman Reedus, though Cohan denied those specific rumors. On Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM show “Radio Andy,” she explained, “In a time of parity in the industry and in my show … it wasn’t actually that I was asking for more, it’s that my contract finished. That’s a pretty standard renegotiation.”

The negotiations fell apart, and instead Cohan starred on the ill-fated ABC series “Whiskey Cavalier.” When that show collapsed, she quickly returned to “The Walking Dead.” Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Cohan insisted that she’d held on to the character during her absence. “I knew she was going to come back; we just didn’t know exactly when. I mentally always had her in a quadrant of my brain and soul.” The main series has now concluded, but Cohan now leads “The Walking Dead: Dead City,” a spinoff that focuses on Maggie and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan.

In the early days of “The Simpsons,” the titular family was often contrasted with the far more religious one that lived next door. Ned Flanders is one of the best characters on “The Simpsons,” and, along with his wife, Maude (Maggie Roswell), both are pious and particular about raising their children, whereas Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and Marge (Julie Kavner) definitely are not. In the Season 11 episode “Alone Again, Natura-Diddily,” however, Maude was shockingly killed off, and suddenly Roswell was no longer voicing one of the show’s original characters.

The voice actor, it turns out, had moved to Denver, even though “The Simpsons” records its audio in Los Angeles. “I used to fly into L.A. on Thursday and fly back that night, and do that on Monday again,” Roswell told The Denver Post. “It was getting to be too much, too expensive, [and] they wouldn’t give me a raise.” She quit, and they killed Maude.

Thankfully, Roswell and the producers were able to work something out so that she could record from Denver, and Roswell returned to the cast several years later. Though she still occasionally voices Maude Flanders in ghost form, Roswell now primarily stars as Helen Lovejoy. “I do it from home, and I could not be more grateful. We work from March until November, two weeks on, one week off. I get SAG insurance. It’s great,” she told the newspaper. “I am living the life.”

In its decades on the air, “Saturday Night Live” has served as a proving ground for plenty of comedians, giving megastars like Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, and many more their start. Not everyone breaks out, though, and plenty of cast members don’t last more than a season or two before Lorne Michaels gives them the chop.

In 1993, when she was only 22, Sarah Silverman was cast on the show. She would later find lots of fame on her own, thanks to her well-received sketch show and caustic stand-up comedy, but she was fired after one bad year at “SNL.” Speaking with GQ, Silverman said she mainly served as an audience plant during monologues. “I was not a fully realized person,” she reflected. “I definitely was not ready for it, but it was an amazing experience, and certainly prepared me for the rest. Everything else was pretty easy after that.”

Unlike most people who are fired after only one season on “SNL,” Silverman later returned to Studio 8H as a host. She helmed an episode in 2014, and she told GQ that the show nodded to her history as a monologue ringer. “I took questions from the audience, and all the questions were me from 1994, asking questions,” she said. “It was kind of awesome, because it was like the sweet, little innocent girl asking me questions, and it was me from so long ago.”

“The Walking Dead” was known for its shocking cast exits, as the showrunners had no problem killing off beloved characters with little warning. One such character who got brutally cut was Jon Bernthal’s Shane Walsh. He’s a longtime friend of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) from before the zombie apocalypse, and the two link back up to discover that Shane has tried to keep Rick’s family safe.

Shane was killed off in the second season, and Bernthal told Conan O’Brien on “Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend” that he took it pretty hard. He sat and watched them film the first episode without him, and it was a difficult experience. “I just palpably understood, you know, I’m not part of that anymore,” he said. “I sat there and I [wept], and I felt sorry for myself, and I knew it was over.”

Bernthal has returned to the show twice, including in the Season 3 episode “Made to Suffer.” Once again, thanks to a hallucination, Shane got killed all over again. Still, Bernthal doesn’t regret anything about his time on the show. He explained to O’Brien, “I think getting killed off was the best thing that ever happened to me in my career, and I’m flabbergasted and grateful for all of it.”

In the first season of “Supernatural,” Jeffrey Dean Morgan played John Winchester. He was the father of Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles), two young men who take over the family business; in this case, it just happens to be killing demons. Unfortunately, John died in the Season 2 premiere, sending his sons spinning emotionally as they tried to hold the forces of evil at bay.

In 2019, Morgan returned to “Supernatural” thanks to an episode that involved some run-of-the-mill time travel. Sam and Dean get to visit an alternate reality where their father had survived, and they fill him in on everything they’d been up to in his absence. The episode was the show’s 300th — that’s a lot of time away from that iconic Chevy Impala — but Morgan told Entertainment Weekly he’d remained close with the actors playing his sons. “To step into it again, it’s like wearing an old pair of boots. I’m friends with these guys, so it’s a joy to come in,” he said.

In fact, it was fitting that Morgan played a proud father to the Winchester boys because he himself was proud of his friends’ accomplishments on the show. “It makes me get choked up because they’ve done so well here,” he said. “Episode 300? That’s unheard of.”

Steve Burton has played Jason Morgan on “General Hospital” for a very long time, ever since the character was aged up in 1991. He’s taken a few hiatuses from the soap opera, including for a stint on “The Young and the Restless,” but for the most part, Burton has long been one of the most recognizable actors on one of the only remaining soaps.

In 2021, however, Burton was fired from “General Hospital” for refusing to comply with the set’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates. He announced the decision in an Instagram video, revealing, “I did apply for my medical and religious exemptions and both of those were denied, which hurts. But this is also about personal freedom to me. I don’t think anybody should lose their livelihood over this.” At the time, ABC required that anyone on set who wouldn’t be wearing a mask be vaccinated to protect others from the disease.

By March 2024, however, restrictions had loosened, and “General Hospital” brought Burton back to Port Charles. In a behind-the-scenes video of his first day on set shared by the show on YouTube, he gushed, “It just feels really good to be back on set with my people.”