“The Audience Will Never Forgive Him”: 9 Times Actors Straight-Up Refused To Shoot A Scripted Storyline To Protect Their Character

First up is Matthew Perry, who point blank refused to act out a Friends storyline where his character, Chandler, would cheat on Monica, played by Courteney Cox. 

Chandler and Monica first got together at the end of Season 4, and according to guest actor Lisa Cash, Chandler was scripted to cheat on her in the Season 5 finale “The One in Vegas: Part 1.”

Lisa was cast to play a Las Vegas hotel worker in the episode, and told TMZ: “The scene was Chandler and Monica were arguing in Vegas about Monica having lunch with Richard, and initially in our script, Chandler goes up to the hotel room, orders room service, and I bring it up as a hotel worker and we end up talking and laughing and connecting and Chandler ends up cheating on Monica with my character.”

“We had rehearsed it and everything,” Lisa went on. “Then the day before we were shooting in front of a live audience I was told that [Matthew] went to the writers and said the audience will never forgive him for cheating on Monica, which he was probably right. That would have changed possibly the course of the show and of his character.”

The episode ended up cutting this scene with Chandler and the hotel worker entirely, and Lisa ultimately played a flight attendant in a scene with Ross and Rachel instead.

And cheating on Monica wasn’t the only time that Matthew stepped in to protect Chandler’s honor, with the actor apparently also shutting down a storyline that he feared would be anti-gay. 

According to Friends expert Saul Austerlitz, who is one of the most prominent pop culture chroniclers of the show and has interviewed several writers, directors, and crew members over the years, a storyline was once proposed in which Chandler would start frequenting a gay bar because he can't get enough of their tuna melts. 

The comedy was said to stem entirely from Chandler’s presence in a queer space as a straight man. Writing in his 2019 book Generation Friends: An Inside Look At The Show That Defined a Television Era, Austerlitz revealed: “Perry said no, and the story was shelved.”

Similarly to Matthew, John Krasinski refused a Season 8 episode of The Office where his character, Jim, was scripted to cheat on his wife, Pam, with Cathy, who was Pam’s maternity leave cover.

The proposed plot would have seen Cathy make romantic advances toward Jim and then kiss him in his hotel room during a business trip to Florida in the episode “After Hours,” but John straight up wouldn’t film it.

"That's the only time I remember putting my foot down,” he recalled in the book Welcome to Dunder Mifflin: The Ultimate Oral History of The Office. “I remember saying things that I never thought I'd say before, like: ‘I’m not going to shoot it.’”

“My feeling is there is a threshold with which you can push our audience,” John explained. “They are so dedicated. We have shown such great respect to them. But there's a moment where if you push them too far, they'll never come back. And I think that if you show Jim cheating, they'll never come back."

Apparently, creator Greg Daniels’ rationale was that he wanted to make the audience think they were going to have “a bad ending so they were happy when they got the good ending,” but John was able to convince him that while Cathy may flirt with Jim, she can never seem like any actual threat to Pam.

During an episode of the And That’s What You Really Missed podcast, Glee star Amber Riley revealed that she refused to film a “full-blown” sex scene for the show, despite the script already being written.

Amber played Mercedes on the hit series, and showrunner Brad Falchuk wanted to show her character lose her virginity to her boyfriend Sam, played by Chord Overstreet, but Amber told him: “Absolutely not.”

“[Brad] said: ‘OK, well what if we just have you guys hold hands and walk into the room and then like close the door?’” Amber recalled, but added that she vetoed that, too. “I was just like: ‘No. I’m not doing it. I don’t ever tell you guys no, I don’t fight about anything, but, this?!’ It would’ve been so awkward and I feel like it would’ve read awkward.”

For context, Mercedes was a Christian and had openly been saving herself for marriage, with Amber noting that losing her virginity in high school “just wasn’t something my character would’ve done” and that she wanted to “let her stick to her guns.”

“I mean, I grew up the church girl. It just wouldn’t happen,” she concluded. “Like, not at that age, you know what I’m saying? Not that easily… And then being pressured and all that kind of stuff, and doing it for someone else when it’s not really what you really believe — the message that I felt that that would’ve sent to young girls wouldn’t have been great.”

It’s fair to say that, objectively, Commander Fred Waterford is absolutely not a good man in The Handmaid’s Tale. However, actor Joseph Fiennes felt that the show was going too far when they scripted Fred raping his wife, Serena, in a Season 2 episode of the show, and refused to shoot it.

“I guess in many ways, as abhorrent and nasty and evil as Fred is, I have to defend parts of him,” Joseph told Entertainment Weekly. “In episode 9, we had a moment where Fred was going to rape — after meeting Luke — rape Serena in a hotel room straight after, and it just didn’t track for me. I had to go out on a limb and refuse to do it because I felt that even though Fred is who he is, he’s human.”

The actor added that he got through to showrunners after “long emails and defending and pushing, and feeling that Yvonne [Strahovski, who played Serena] had tracked Serena so beautifully that her disenfranchisement with the regime and Fred was so beautifully charted it didn’t need a heavy scene to kind of suddenly push her over the edge.”

Dylan and Cole Sprouse may have only been 12 years old when they landed their hit Disney TV show, The Suite Life Of Zack & Cody back in 2005, but they already had some serious integrity. 

Kim Rhodes, who played their onscreen mom, Carey, previously revealed that Dylan refused to make a scripted "fat joke" about her when she got pregnant during filming. 

“I got pregnant when I was on the show, and, of course, the show dealt with it by making fat jokes. One of my favorite memories is that Dylan had a line that was a fat joke, and he kept skipping over it,” Kim explained during an appearance on the Back To The Best podcast. 

“It was in the middle of a chunk of dialogue, so he kept skipping this laugh line and skipping it, and skipping it, and skipping it,” she continued. “Finally, we get in front of the studio audience and he skips it, and the executive producer screams: ‘Cut!’”

“He goes: ‘Dylan, say the line,’” Kim recalled, before detailing Dylan’s impressive response. “He goes: ‘I would not disrespect any woman that way, let alone this woman. You write something funny and I’ll say it.’"

And Dylan isn’t the only actor to have pushed back on this kind of joke, with James Corden refusing to shoot a scene in the British soap opera Hollyoaks unless details of it were changed super early on in his career.

The star would have been around 21 years old when he was cast as a school janitor in the show back in 1999, and James was left horrified when he learned that the plan was for his character’s bedroom to be covered in posters of fast food. 

“I thought they were just being nasty about anyone who was overweight,” he later told the New Yorker. “I remember saying to the guy: ‘I don’t know one person who would take a picture of a hot dog and a burger and stick them on the wall.'”

James refused to start filming until the posters were taken down.

Meanwhile, William Daniels admitted that he almost didn’t play the iconic role of Mr. Feeny in Boy Meets World because he refused to make a teacher look like a “fool” on TV.

"At a meeting with the show's author and executive producer, Michael Jacobs, already an established playwright and sitcom creator, as well as movie producer, I told him I didn't want to play a high school teacher who's made to look foolish for the sake of some cheap laughs," Bill wrote in his memoir There I Go Again: How I Came to Be Mr. Feeny, John Adams, Dr. Craig, KITT, & Many Others.

"I had too much respect for the underpaid, under-appreciated teachers of this country to portray one of them a fool,” he explained, adding that Michael was “very persuasive and assured me that he would never have me play an idiot, so I came on board.”

However, Bill was left disappointed after the sitcom’s first-ever table read, and immediately went to Michael’s office to quit the role because he was unhappy with Mr. Feeny’s storyline.

“Michael and I are very close. He likes to tell the story that we had one read-through of the rehearsal and I went to his office and I quit,” Bill recalled to People. “And he said: ‘Bill, that was just a read-through.’ I said: ‘Yeah, but —.’ He said: ‘Listen to me. I’m going to rework this tonight and you tell me tomorrow. If you want to [quit], OK? But wait until I revise it.’ So the next day, the whole thing, it was different! He rewrote the damn thing. So, I stayed.”

As you may know, Bill played Mr. Feeny for all seven seasons of the hit sitcom, which aired between 1993 and 2000, and even reprised his role in the show’s spin-off series, Girl Meets World, in 2014.

But, unfortunately, not all storyline pushbacks are well-received by those at the top, which Harold Perrineau learned the hard way during his time on Lost, where he played Michael. 

Fans of the show probably recall that Season 1 ends with Michael’s son, Walt, being kidnapped from a raft as they and other survivors try to leave the island to get help.

And Harold was left unimpressed when Season 2 of the show kicked off with his character being pretty unfazed by the disappearance of his young son, and instead focused on Sawyer, which led to conflict with the showrunners.

In an in-depth Vanity Fair article that was more broadly about the toxic behind-the-scenes culture at Lost, Harold said that in the original draft of Season 2, episode 2, Michael only mentioned his kidnapped son once.

“Michael’s asking Sawyer questions about his past, about how he feels, but he never again mentions Walt,” Harold shared as he recalled thinking: “I don’t think I can do that. I can’t be another person who doesn’t care about missing Black boys, even in the context of fiction, right? This is just furthering the narrative that nobody cares about Black boys, even Black fathers.”

Harold was told that the episode wasn’t about his character, and his response was: “‘Cool, it’s not about me. I’m not making it about me. I just can’t have this father not care about his son. Could we put in some more lines that show he cares about his son?’ They didn’t. I ad-libbed some lines. I didn’t give a shit at that point.”

And while Harold did eventually get a revised script weeks later that centered the episode on Michael and Walt instead of Sawyer, the actor was told at the end of Season 2 that his character would not be returning. The character of Michael did feature later on in the series, but was reduced to a supporting role instead of a main focus.