TV Actors Who Almost Quit Acting Altogether

For many actors, the idea of quitting is unthinkable. Why would anyone give up on Hollywood after they worked so hard to get there? Well, you'd be surprised by how many actors have told themselves that their next audition would be their last. It's far more common than you may think, especially in the world of television — movie stars can often land roles on name recognition alone, but for those who earn their living on the small screen, the grind can be a lot harder.

Some of the actors on this list hadn't made a name for themselves yet and were worried they might never be successful in Hollywood, so they came dangerously close to throwing in the towel. Others considered abandoning showbiz to explore an alternate career path, and if the stars hadn't aligned perfectly, then these actors might have become mechanics or butchers instead. There are even a handful of TV actors who had already become successful yet still contemplated leaving Hollywood when times got tough. In spite of everything, something would always call them back.

The star of "Damsel" has come a long way since childhood, and, believe it or not, this actor nearly gave up on her dream job. Before "Stranger Things," Millie Bobby Brown almost quit acting. She had auditioned to play Lyanna Mormont in "Game of Thrones" (a role that ultimately went to Bella Ramsey), and Brown was deeply disheartened when she didn't get the part.

What's more, when she was only ten years old, a casting director left her in tears. According to Brown, this casting director told her not only that she wouldn't get the part, but also that she was unlikely to ever succeed as an actor because she was "too mature." This is a cruel and somewhat perplexing thing to tell a child actor. Brown told Allure that this rejection was "really hard because I thought [maturity] was a good thing. And then being told that it wasn't, that I wouldn't make it in this industry, it was so hurtful."

In the end, though, Millie Bobby Brown had the last laugh. Her parents convinced her to try one last audition, and if that didn't work out, she could stop worrying about her acting career and go back to just being a kid. This last audition was none other than "Stranger Things." She got the part because it turned out that "too mature" was exactly what the showrunners needed for her character. Now Millie Bobby Brown wears "too mature" as a badge of honor.

Cole Sprouse is not one of those Disney Channel stars whose careers tanked after their shows ended. His career did, however, take a surprising new direction. After "The Suite Life on Deck" ended, Sprouse left the spotlight so he could attend college, and along the way he found a love for archaeology. The actor spent five years studying to become an archaeologist, a job that meant he got to travel the world.

Sprouse has insisted that this new field was not as glamorous as you might think. During an appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," he said, "If you guys saw what archaeology really was, [it's] just six weeks of me over a one-by-one trench of dirt with a spoon." He added, "I was working in this little archeological lab, like a treasure goblin, just putting artifacts into bags and labeling them in some dingy basement."

You'd think the not-so-glamorous nature of his work impacted his decision to return to Hollywood, but it was actually just fate. "I didn't really think of returning to acting, at all, and then the winds took me back," he told W Magazine. As Sprouse recalled, he got a call from his manager, urging him to try auditioning again. Sprouse ultimately agreed, but he told Stephen Colbert that he had been thinking, "If I don't get anything, I don't think I'm gonna come back." Not only did the actor land the role of Jughead on "Riverdale," but he stayed with the show for seven seasons.

Before she found success as an actor, Chrissy Metz actually worked as a talent agent, helping other actors get jobs. Although she kept auditioning, Metz was starting to believe she'd never break into the industry herself. "I went on unemployment," Metz said of her lowest point during an interview with Glamour. "I bought ramen noodles at dollar stores." Luckily, her friend Gina was kind enough to put her up rent-free. According to Metz (via Sirius XM), Gina told her, "I know it's gonna happen for you, so you'll pay me back when you pay me back." Metz, however, was less optimistic that she would ever become successful enough to repay Gina, and her financial situation was getting dire.

"When I booked 'This Is Us,' I had 81 cents in my bank account," Metz told Glamour. (Metz is in good company; there are plenty of successful actors who went broke at some point in their careers.) Things got so bad that she couldn't even afford to put gas in her car, so she was concerned she wouldn't be able to make it to the audition. So when she got the call informing her she had gotten the part, the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Metz is still awestruck at how quickly her fate changed. "I was going to quit acting and move back home," she told Today. "And now, my mom is going to be my Emmy date."

A midlife crisis is tough for anyone, but it can be especially devastating for an actor who hits 40 and still hasn't gotten their big break. For years, Laverne Cox had gotten plenty of bit parts, but nothing substantial, nothing that allowed her to portray a complex, three-dimensional character. "You get, you know, five lines on 'Law & Order' or you're playing sex worker No. 6 on an HBO show," she told People. "I played a sex worker seven different times." The "sex worker" stereotype, Cox has argued, is unfortunately an all-too-common role written for trans actors like herself, and she felt like these roles didn't give her the opportunity to use the full range of her talent.

By the time she turned 40, Cox was not where she wanted to be in her life. Deep in debt and struggling to find work, she was beginning to wonder if her acting career was really worth it. Speaking to People, Cox recalled thinking, "I've got to do something else. Who do I think I am? I'm a Black trans woman — no one's ever done this before." She came very close to abandoning her acting dream and going to grad school. Yet, just when Cox was ready to throw in the towel, she found a home with the cast of "Orange Is the New Black," and she never looked back. The show "turned out to be my grad school," she concluded.

Jenna Fischer recalls moving from St. Louis to Los Angeles after college, confident she could break into the industry with relative ease. In reality, her path to success was a long and winding one. Six months had passed since she arrived in Los Angeles, and Fischer was still no closer to getting any job offers. "Broke and depressed, I faced reality and looked for a day job, eventually becoming a receptionist," she told The New York Times. She added, "The thought of quitting was constant. But I was too embarrassed to go back to St. Louis. I'd basically told everyone I was going to be this big star in Hollywood, and after almost a year I hadn't booked a single job."

When she did land her first acting gig, it was not exactly every actor's dream; the first official performance of her career was for a sex education video. It was far from glamorous, but it gave Fischer enough hope to keep going. Her patience paid off, because she eventually earned a spot on "The Office." Funnily enough, Fischer's secretarial experience may have been pivotal in landing her breakout role. Fischer shared that she could identify so much with her character Pam Beesly, telling the Hudson Union Society, "That was me. I was an administrative assistant who didn't know how to make her dreams happen." No doubt the casting director of "The Office" must have seen that in Fischer.

Claire Danes knew right from the start that she wanted to be an actor. In an interview with Vogue, she recalled telling her family, "Money or no money, I have to act. There's no plan B. That's it." Danes was nine years old at the time. Despite early success with "Romeo + Juliet" and awards recognition for her performance in "Temple Grandin," Danes hit a rough patch later in her career. She went for two years without a single role. She did get some job offers, but none of them were roles that grabbed her, and none gave her an opportunity to challenge herself. She told Vogue, "A point came where I thought, I really like interior design." The actor remembers a friend telling her, "Maybe your real success is in your personal life."

When she finally got the call that revived her career, Danes actually had to stop and think it over. Knowing that starring in the TV show "Homeland" would require her to play a deeply flawed CIA agent, Danes was worried that inhabiting the headspace of such a messy character for multiple seasons would be draining. Around the same time, she had also auditioned to play a supporting role in "J. Edgar" — she would've portrayed the secretary of Leonardo DiCaprio's character. Danes could only choose one, but in the end, it was an obvious choice. She told Vogue, "Do I want to play the secretary to the boss man or do I want to be the boss man? I want to be the boss man."

If you're curious about what happened to the cast of "Weeds," you may be surprised to learn that the star of the show almost quit acting altogether. In fact, Mary-Louise Parker went so far as to publicly announce that she was planning on leaving showbiz. In an interview with news.com.au, Parker declared, "I don't know how many more movies I wanna do. I wouldn't mind doing a TV show again, I'd like to do a couple more plays, but I'm almost done acting, I think."

Parker (who starred as single mother-turned-drug baron Nancy Botwin in the hit show) argued that Hollywood was not the place it was when she first started. "It's a mean culture — it's reality TV and it's watching people suffer and watching people humiliate themselves," she shared in her interview with the Australian outlet. "It's like someone just lifted up a rock and that's all we're looking at." She added, "I stay away from it as best I can because I'm too thin-skinned."

Yet, in spite of this, Parker couldn't stay away completely. She is more selective about her movie and TV roles, since she wants to spend more time with her kids, but she has appeared in multiple projects since announcing she would leave Hollywood, including "Red Sparrow" and "Omni Loop." Parker is also active on the theater side of things, having starred in the Broadway play "The Sound Inside." She has pointed out that theater is why she pursued acting in the first place. "The rest of it is stuff that came along," she told Vanity Fair.

It's not very often that a Hollywood star must choose between being an actor or a butcher, but that's exactly the choice Eric Stonestreet needed to make. Two months before he was cast in "Modern Family," Stonestreet hit a nadir in his acting career. He told Mental Health Television Network that he always wanted to be a concierge butcher and was starting to feel like the time was right for a career change, but a friend talked him out of it.

Part of why Stonestreet wanted out was because he felt that his options were limited in Hollywood. He had learned by this point in his career that there were certain roles he was unlikely to ever get cast in, just because of his body type. In an interview for the podcast "I Think You're Interesting," he explained, "For a long time, I could look at my resume and my reel and say, 'I didn't get any of those jobs because of me being a heavyset guy.'"

Stonestreet didn't want to take any roles that involved his body becoming the punchline. Once he found "Modern Family," he knew he had landed on a perfect match. Stonestreet shared that if he ever suggested changing his character's lines to steer clear of body-shaming jokes, the showrunners listened. "We're not saying the word 'fat' that many times," he said. "We can say it a couple times, but I don't want to talk about that. We can come up with better, creative ways."

Colman Domingo hates the term "struggling actor." In an interview with The Talks, he said: "I was never a struggling actor! I was an actor." However, there was a brief moment in his life when he no longer wanted to be one. Early in his career, Domingo couldn't seem to get a part with more than five lines of dialogue. He had high hopes when he auditioned to play a maître d' in "Boardwalk Empire," a part with more substance. As Domingo recounted in an interview with NPR, his agent called him to say, "Casting loved you. Producers, directors — everyone loved you. You were great." However, she added that he hadn't gotten the part.

According to Domingo, his agent said the showrunners wanted an actor with lighter skin, citing historical accuracy as the reason. Domingo, who had been in a gym at the time, recalled screaming in outrage and then bursting into tears. "That's when I lost my mind," he told The New York Times, adding that he remembered thinking, "I can't take it anymore, I think this is going to kill me." He vowed to never act again. Luckily for us all, Domingo didn't quit. Instead, a friend of his persuaded him to switch to a different agent. Domingo agreed to start auditioning again, and soon he landed a role on "Fear the Walking Dead." The actor is grateful for this moment, telling NPR, "It reinvigorated my faith in what I had to give."

"This Is Us" star Milo Ventimiglia almost gave up acting on more than one occasion. The first instance was right before his big break; the actor had been putting some serious thought into becoming an auto mechanic, but then he got cast in "Gilmore Girls." After that series ended, he bounced from project to project, unable to find a role as rewarding as "Gilmore Girls." Then came the NBC series "Heroes," a show that gave him the fulfillment he was looking for.

Sadly, by the fourth season of "Heroes," Ventimiglia had become disillusioned, believing that the series had transformed from character-driven storytelling to a TV show more concerned with spectacle. After "Heroes," there came a point where he had been out of work for a full year, and, as he revealed in an interview with Variety, he'd begun to wonder, "Well, if they're not buying what I'm selling, what am I doing here still selling?"

At this point, he contemplated leaving the country and living a simple life in Italy. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he said that he told himself, "I'm gonna shave my head, I'm gonna grow a beard, [and] I'm gonna work on a farm." Luckily, "This Is Us" came along, and now Ventimiglia is not sure if he can picture himself doing anything else. "I'm so rooted into being creative and hopefully adding to the community of Hollywood — and adding to people's break from real life," he told Variety.

If you're wondering why Ruth from "Ozark" looks so familiar, it's because Julia Garner acted in several independent films as a teenager, including "Marcy Martha May Marlene" and "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." Yet, by the time she turned 21, Garner found that getting cast didn't come quite as easily anymore. She went for months without any job offers, and Garner suspected this was because of her age. "You're not 16 or 17 anymore. You're not the bright, shiny new toy, and this business relies on shining," she told People. The actor also said, "I remember thinking, If I'm still in the same place in five years, I don't want to do this."

Garner had trained herself not to get her hopes up too much for any given role, knowing that she might not get the part. But, in spite of herself, she really liked the part of Ruth in "Ozark," and she wanted it badly. The casting director's response seemed lukewarm to her, so she assumed she had botched her audition. In an interview for the podcast "Can't Stop Watching," she recalled telling her mother, "Well, I'm going to forget about this. I'm not going to hear from this project. It's just not happening." Not only did it happen, but it also propelled her into stardom and won her multiple Emmy Awards. Garner found this role so fulfilling that she told Entertainment Weekly, "I could shoot 'Ozark' for the rest of my life."