10 Actors Who Refused To Die On Screen
1. Ricky Jay - Deadwood
For many, many years now, it's been hinted at by several cast and crew members of HBO's Deadwood that a member of the Western series' huge ensemble cast managed to weasel out of being killed.
Well, in a 2019 Rolling Stone article to commemorate the belated release of Deadwood: The Movie, the actor in question was revealed to be none other than the late, great Ricky Jay.
The magician-actor appeared throughout the show's first season as card dealer Eddie Sawyer, and the article mentions that the cast laughed about Jay preventing Eddie's murder by... simply not turning up to shoot his scripted death scene.
Matt Zoller Seitz's recently released Deadwood Bible goes into further detail, that when Jay got to set and found out he was written to die, he had a panic attack and locked himself in his trailer for two hours.
Jay only agreed to emerge from his trailer and shoot the scene if it was staged as a stabbing rather than a killing, leaving his fate ambiguous.
But Deadwood creator David Milch instructed Powers Boothe, who played Jay's on-screen assailant Sy Tolliver, to pretend-stab him in a way that looked fatal.
Ultimately it was a moot point as the scene was cut for time, and though Milch planned to re-shoot Eddie's death at the start of season two, Jay hilariously declined to return, effectively granting Eddie a stay of execution.
He was instead written out off-screen, with Tolliver noting that he left the Deadwood camp before he could kill him for stealing from him.
How's that for a vanishing act?