Child Actors Who Disappeared From Hollywood After Being Replaced

Hollywood is certainly a fickle industry, quick to brush aside actors that no longer suit its needs for one reason or another — and more than ready to replace them with eager performers willing to take his or her place. Unfortunately, this seems especially true for kid actors. Children and teenagers often find that their careers are over before they've barely even begun, with some child stars winding up with normal jobs as grown-ups when acting was no longer in the cards for them.

There's a trend of young actors who are cast in a movie or television show, only to find themselves not asked back for the movie's sequel or the show's next season. In some cases, the replacement even happens right in the middle of a season. What everyone in this feature has in common is that they vacated a role they were playing in a film or TV series — either because they were fired, they chose not to come back, or some other extenuating circumstance occurred — and that role was then picked up by another actor. Meanwhile, the original actors were either never seen on screen again following being replaced, or they didn't come back until decades later and for little more than a cameo. 

HBO's "Big Love" had a pretty large ensemble, but that's to be expected given that it centered around a polygamous marriage between a man and his three wives, with each wife having their own set of children. And that's to say nothing of the extended families as well as the various friends and romantic partners of all of the kids. It's definitely a lot to keep track of — so much so that it was easy to miss the fact that one of the kids switched actors during the show's five-season run.

Tancy "Teenie" Henrickson is the daughter of patriarch Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) and his first — and only legal — wife, Barb Henrickson (Jeanne Tripplehorn). She is youngest of the three children Bill and Barb had together. Teenie was played by Jolean Wejbe for all of Season 1 and Season 2 and part of Season 3. At that point, future Disney Channel mainstay Bella Thorne took over playing Teenie, doing so for the remainder of the run of "Big Love." The show's co-creator, Will Scheffer, said that Wejbe was simply maturing too quickly, and was starting to look significantly older than Teenie was supposed to be — so they had no choice but to recast her. Meanwhile, Wejbe hasn't acted since leaving "Big Love," seeming to go in a different direction than a life in show business since her time as Teenie came to an end. 

While "The Monkees" was a musical sitcom about a fictional band that eventually became a real one and toured for decades after the show ended, the titular family from "The Partridge Family" weren't quite so lucky. David Cassidy had some minor success as a solo musician, but for the most part, the cast members of "The Partridge Family" continued on as largely non-musical actors — that is, if they even acted that much at all.

One particular "Partridge Family" actor, Jeremy Gelbwaks, did zero acting after his time on the show. In fact, he did zero acting before the show, either — his 25 episodes as Chris Partridge during the show's first season encompass his sole acting credit. According to Shirley Jones, who played Partridge matriarch Shirley, Gelbwaks's heart was never really in it and it made him a bit difficult to work with as he clearly had no interest in being there. Apparently, he only auditioned for the show because his parents forced him to, and it wasn't something he had any interest in or passion for. So the show replaced him with Brian Forster beginning in Season 2, who played Chris Partridge for the subsequent three seasons. Gelbwaks has lived an entirely private life since his very brief acting stint. 

What a lot of people don't know about sci-fi action classic "Aliens" is that it was initially stuck in development hell. The real reason it took seven years for "Aliens" to get made was, quite simply, that the original actually wasn't a huge hit upon release and Fox was unconvinced that a sequel was warranted. Not surprisingly, James Cameron's incredible script finally won the studio over, and one of the best action movies of all time was finally put into production.

If "Aliens" had never been made, child actress Carrie Henn would've never brought Rebecca "Newt" Jorden to life. Those who have seen the movie know that Newt is one of the only characters to survive to the end, also being among the select few to return for the eventual sequel "Alien 3" — sort of. Essentially, Newt only appears in "Alien 3" as a corpse that an autopsy is performed on — but it wasn't Henn, as she had aged six years since the release of "Aliens," yet "Alien 3" picks up right where "Aliens" left off. 

"Aliens" was Henn's first acting role, and for 34 years, it was her only acting role. She did voice a character in a 2020 animated miniseries called "Thunder Island," though it was just a cameo playing a character that didn't even have a name. In recent years, Henn has started to make appearances at various horror and sci-fi conventions, and has always spoken fondly of her memories making "Aliens."

It is a longstanding tradition that child animated characters are voiced by adults, often women. This allows for actors like Nancy Cartwright to continue to voice Bart Simpson for over 35 years and counting. But there are also times when actual kids voice young characters, which does bring a nice bit of authenticity to the performance. Of course, the downside is that those kids can't always keep playing the character as their voices age. Or, they simply don't want to. As such, Dora had three different voice actors over the eight seasons of the original "Dora the Explorer" series.

The original voice for Dora was provided by Kathleen Herles, who vacated the role after four seasons when she chose to focus on her education. But she eventually returned to not only voice acting, but the "Dora" franchise specifically, playing Dora's mom in the 2024 reboot series "Dora." Replacing her in the original series was Caitlin Sanchez, who beat out around 600 other girls to score the highly-coveted role. But Sanchez only played Dora for 35 episodes across a three-year stint before Nickelodeon decided that her voice had already started to sound too old to play the character. At that point, Fátima Ptacek became the third Dora, seeing it through to the end of the original series as well as both seasons of the sequel series "Dora and Friends: Into the City!"

Sanchez later filed a lawsuit against Nickelodeon for allegedly underpaying her for royalties from reruns of her episodes, as well as intentionally pressuring her into signing an unfair contract. Dora remains her most recent screen credit of any kind.  

It was a big deal when acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro announced that he was branching out into television with "The Strain," which he co-created with Chuck Hogan based on the novel of the same name that the duo also wrote. It ran for four seasons on FX between 2014 and 2017, following the story of a plane crash that seemed to spark a virus that turned people into vampires. Among the sizeable cast of main characters was Zach Goodweather, son of series lead Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll).

In Season 1, Zach was played by actor Ben Hyland, who had previously appeared in "House of Cards," "Blue Bloods," and the movie "Marley & Me." But in the leadup to Season 2, "The Strain" showrunner and executive producer Carlton Cuse revealed that actor Max Charles would be taking over as Zach going forward. Cuse told Deadline, "We recast this part due to some specific story needs we have downstream. We are sad to see Ben go. He is a very talented actor and a wonderful person. We will all miss him and thank him for his great work." Some took that to mean that Hyland wasn't cutting it talent-wise, and didn't seem like he was going to have the chops to handle the ramping up of Zach's role going forward. 

Either way, it's been 15 years as of this writing since Hyland was replaced in "The Strain," and he's yet to add any additional work to his filmography.

There are actually quite a few actors who haven't acted since "Game of Thrones" ended. But some didn't even make it to the finale of the series — or the death of their characters, for that matter — to reach the apparent final bow of their acting career. Among that group is Callum Wharry, whose sole screen credit remains the eight episodes he spent playing Tommen Baratheon in the first two seasons of the series.

Despite having already played an entirely different character — Martyn Lannister — for two Season 3 episodes, actor Dean-Charles Chapman took over the role of Tommen Baratheon beginning in Season 4. Chapman continued to play the character through Tommen's death in the final episode of Season 6. Martyn Lannister was already dead, so nobody needed to take over playing him after Chapman switched to Tommen. No official reason was ever given as to why Wharry was replaced with Chapman, but it's generally assumed that it was because Tommen had much more mature storylines and needed to be a few years older at that point in the storyline. 

An entire generation of people can still both see and hear Tami Stronach's performance of The Childlike Empress from "The NeverEnding Story" in their heads 40 years later, especially because of how often the actress directly looked into the camera as if to address the audience. But when the sequels began to roll in and Stronach was no longer playing the role, it has led many people to ask — where is the Childlike Empress from "NeverEnding Story" now? 

To be fair, the actors who played Sebastian and Atreyu were also both replaced for "The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter," but their original stars both continued acting for at least a few years. It was only Stronach who seemed to disappear off the face of the earth after the first film, with the character played by Alexandra Johnes in the second movie and Julie Cox in the third — both of whom continued to act after they ended their own stints in the role. It turns out that Stronach's mother worried about the potential downside of being a huge child star, and not only refused to sign her on for a second "NeverEnding Story" movie, but essentially took her out of the industry entirely. 

Stronach stayed off the screen for 24 years, at which point she returned for a miniseries that aired in the Czech Republic in 2008. She has since seemed to slightly dip her toe back into acting again, but as of yet she's only been in two very small movies in the last 20 years.

The only "Modern Family" characters to appear in every episode of the show are Jay Pritchett (Ed O'Neill), Gloria Delgado-Pritchett (Sofia Vergara), Claire Dunphy (Julie Bowen), Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell), Mitchell Pritchett (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), and Cameron Tucker (Eric Stonestreet). But there is also a character who wasn't even played by the same actor throughout the entire run of the series — Lily Tucker-Pritchett. And, no, we don't only mean because she was played by twins.

When the acclaimed sitcom began, Lily was played by Ella & Jaden Hiller. Things were fine for Season 1, but during Season 2, the Hiller girls were no longer babies and became a bit more aware of being actors on a TV show — and they didn't really click with the experience. When their mother, Michelle Hiller, informed "Modern Family" producers that she was taking her girls off the show, they tried to talk her out of it and even offered the girls more money, asking how they could make the experience better for the young actresses. 

But Michelle prioritized her daughters' happiness over a paycheck and a showbiz life, and she pulled Ella & Jaden from the show — at which point 4-year-old Aubrey Anderson-Emmons was brought in to take over as Lily, playing her for the remainder of the series. Ella & Jaden Hiller have as of yet not returned to acting or even any sort of public life. 

There seemed to be an especially high number of horror movies in the late 1970s and early 1980s that had children front and center. In a few cases, those children were even the de facto main villain, as was the case with 1976's "The Omen." It centers around a young boy named Damien Thorn (Harvey Spencer Stephens) who is secretly swapped by a man whose wife had lost her own baby at childbirth. And it doesn't take long before the family realizes that Damien is far from a normal child, especially in his bizarrely violent rejections of anything related to church or religion.

"The Omen" was the screen debut of Stephens, just six years old when the movie was released. The performance even earned him a Golden Globe nomination. But when "Damien: Omen II" was released just two years later, featuring the return of the same character from the original, that character was played by Jonathan Scott-Taylor instead. So what happened to Stephens? According to the actor himself, he just wasn't particularly interested in pursuing a career in acting — with the notoriously troubled production of "The Omen" certainly not giving the young actor the best first impression of the industry. 

While Stephens did play a small role in the 1980 TV movie "Gauguin the Savage," it was far from Hollywood, and it was the last acting Stephens would do for 26 years before making a winking cameo as a tabloid reporter for the 2006 reboot of "The Omen," which remains his most recent screen credit. 

When people start inquiring as to what the cast of "Jane the Virgin" is doing now, there is almost never a mention of Joseph Sanders. And that's in spite of the fact that he played a pretty important character — Matteo, the son of titular character Jane (Gina Rodriguez) and her eventual husband Rafael (Justin Baldoni). But Sanders wasn't the actor who played Matteo the longest, nor was he the most recent Matteo. That distinction belongs to Elias Janssen, who played Matteo for Seasons 4 and 5.

In fact, Sanders also wasn't the first Matteo. The character was initially played by several different babies and infants in his earliest appearances. It wasn't until Matteo hit four years old that he got his first semi-permanent performer in Sanders, who played Matteo for 11 episodes. But when the character really started to come into his own, that's when Janssen took over for the long haul. As for Sanders, his short stint on "Jane the Virgin" is one of only two total acting credits to his name. For the other, he doesn't play a named character, but rather a small role credited only as "liquor store clerk" in the 2020 indie caper comedy "Zola."