11 Times Actors Couldn’t Hide Just How Much They Hated The Endings To Their Own Shows

Now, before there was You, there was the Upper East Side, and Penn’s character Dan Humphries came out of Gossip Girl with a pretty happy ending. But after the big reveal that Dan was the anonymous blogger that had been terrorizing Serena Van der Woodson’s elite clique, fans were left pretty mad that Dan got off scot-free. Many people also felt that Gossip Girl’s actions didn’t necessarily make sense — and Penn agreed. In a conversation for Variety with his costar Chace Crawford, who played Nate Archibald, the two agreed that the reveal “didn’t line up with the character of Dan.” And if Penn’s inability to get through his final scene without laughing doesn’t say it all, IDK what does. 

While the whole ending for The Umbrella Academy left a lot of fans infuriated, one particular aspect of the last season had one actor scratching his head. David, who plays Diego, expressed his displeasure at his character’s wife, Lila (Ritu Arya), entering a relationship with his brother, Five (Aidan Gallagher). In an interview with Us Weekly, David said he was “pissed off” and “angry” and went so far as to ask the showrunner, Steve Blackman, if the storyline was necessary multiple times, and tried to “convince” him that Diego had to emerge victorious with his girl and his relationship intact. However, as fans know, neither brother won in the end. 

Ah, cyclical narratives. They can be fun, but they can also be disappointing. For many fans, this was the case with Rory’s ending in the 2020 revival of Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life. While the return to Stars Hollow answered questions, people were maddened by Alexis’s character Rory’s seeming lack of growth. And when the series ended with Rory announcing her pregnancy to her mother, Lorelai, Alexis herself expressed that it “certainly wasn’t the ending [she] expected.” In a conversation with Deadline, she said revealed that the ending was “a hard thing to digest,” and that that she had told the show’s creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, that she’d hoped Rory “would end on a high note after all of her hard work.” “I wanted to see her succeed and be thriving,” she explained. 

Although you might expect an actor to root for their character to get a happy ending, that definitely wasn’t the case for Ian and his character Damon Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries. Ian revealed to Access Hollywood that he and his costar, Paul Wesley who played his brother Stefan, both wanted their characters to die at the end of the show. “We were fighting over who would die,” Paul revealed, before Ian explained that he felt it would be more “poetic” that the two brothers would not survive after they had spent years terrorizing the town of Mystic Falls. 

While the ending to Lost definitely left a lot of fans pretty confused, Evangeline, who played Kate Austen on the show, took more issue with her own character’s arc, especially in the later seasons. Speaking on The Lost Boys podcast, she revealed that some of Kate’s plot points “irritated the shit out of [her].” Evangeline explained that she was dissatisfied with Kate’s preoccupation with her romantic interests and lack of agency, saying that she “threw scripts across the room.” “There was eventual lack of dimension to what was going on with her,” she said. “I wanted her to be better, because she was an icon for strength and autonomy for women, and I thought we could have done better.” 

As if it wasn’t enough that Sarah’s character Hayley ended up with Dylan instead of her soulmate, Andy (source: me), fans were also left blindsided due to Hayley’s lack of screen time as the show wrapped up. While the last season was airing, Sarah took to social media to voice her frustration at her character’s storyline being so centered around her children and taking her away from the main plot. She also expressed her disappointment in an interview with Cosmopolitan, saying that she would have preferred Hayley to be excelling as a working mom and “owning her badassery” as so many working women do.

The ending to The Sopranos was definitely left pretty ambiguous, but James, who played Tony himself, was initially pretty bewildered. In a conversation with Vanity Fair, James recalled that after reading the script where Tony supposedly dies, he had a pretty explicit reaction. “When I first saw the ending, I said, ‘What the fuck.’ I mean, after all I went through, all this death, and then it’s over like that?” However, while he initially reacted strongly, James said that after a night of sleep, he felt the ending was “perfect.” 

Dana Scully my beloved. Gillian never went on the record to share her feelings about her character Scully’s ending (which involved multiple pregnancies, none of which were handled particularly deftly by the narrative), but fans were not shy about expressing their disappointment with Scully’s treatment. And while Gillian did not directly enter the conversation, at the time she tweeted a gif of her character rubbing her forehead exasperatedly, captioned, “Oh boy oh boy do I ever hear you.” Which says it all, I think. 

The ending of Dexter is considered by many to be one of the worst endings on television ever, point blank period. Michael, who plays the titular serial killer, discreetly expressed his displeasure at his character Dexter’s lack of consequences for euthanizing and disposing of his own sister in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, saying his feelings about the finale were “mostly sadness.” Later, he told The Daily Beast that his main reasoning for agreeing to the series’ revival was so that they could narratively retcon the original “unsatisfying” ending. 

And finally, we have the ensemble reaction to possibly the most devastating series ending of all time. It definitely wasn’t just one actor who felt that the Season 8 finale wasn’t up to standard — if Jason Momoa’s public crashout on social media, Maisie Williams declaring that the show “fell off,” or Emilia Clarke crying and going on a five hour mental health walk after reading her final scripts are anything to go by. However, despite so many of the cast dropping their true feelings about the ending in interviews or online, nothing sums up their reactions better than this video, capturing the table read of the final episode. Tag yourself: I’m Kit Harington with his head in his hands.