14 Off-Screen Deaths That There’s No Time to Mourn
Whether you’ve got a respected actor who’s taken a position in the Obama administration, or a universally loathed actor who finally quit, a character’s sudden death is a great opportunity to honor or completely debase your coworker.
‘Community’: Pierce Hawthorne
Chevy Chase has been a menace to the cast and crew around him for decades, and Community famously disrespected him by making the character of Pierce reflect the doddering racism of the actor himself. The season after he left the show, it was casually revealed that he died of dehydration while filling up jugs of sperm.
‘Jurassic Park’: Ray Arnold
Samuel L. Jackson played the park’s harried chief engineer, Ray Arnold. Arnold was sent into the danger zone to fulfill his destiny as the IT guy — turn the power off and on again — only to disappear under mysterious circumstances. He makes one final appearance as a severed hand on Laura Dern’s shoulder, hinting at a grizzly death.
‘Jojo Rabbit’: Rosie Beltzer
Scarlett Johansson’s character is revealed to be part of the anti-Nazi resistence, and her last appearance in the film is from the shins down, having been hung in a public square.
‘House’: Dr. Lawrence Kutner
When Kal Penn was recruited into the Obama administration, the writers had to think quick. They had Kutner, who had no canonical problems that might lead one to such a fate, summarily commit suicide off-screen.
‘Seinfeld’: Susan Ross
The main four didn’t feel like they had much chemistry with actress Heidi Swedberg, who played George’s fiance for 28 episodes. They needed a way to get her off the show, but it wouldn’t be very George to simply initiate or endure a breakup. They had her keel over after licking too many toxic stamps for their wedding invitations, and die off-screen soon after.
‘Stand by Me’: Chris Chambers
In the closing where-are-they-now monologue, the update on River Phoenix’s character is quite a roller coaster: He and Gordie got through college prep courses together, but drifted apart, but Chris became a successful lawyer, but he was stabbed to death in a restaurant fight.
‘Doctor Who’: The 6th Doctor
Actor Colin Baker was expecting at least one more season to wrap up his arc on the show, but the BBC said the best they could do was one episode. Baker declined to participate, and actor Sylvester McCoy had to kick off his tenure playing the lifeless body of the 6th Doctor (with makeup and prosthetics to look vaguely like Baker).
‘Brokeback Mountain’: Jack Twist
A torrid, illicit love affair is capped off by a phone call in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s character is revealed to have been killed in a freak accident when a car tire exploded in his face and he drowned in his own blood. It’s also mentioned that the (young, healthy) Jack had requested that his ashes be scattered on Brokeback Mountain, the place where their love blossomed, which is a nice consolation.
‘Breaking Bad’: Steve Gomez
Hank Schrader’s right-hand man went down in a blaze of glory — mere feet away from Hank’s much more dramatic on-screen death.
‘Wakanda Forever’: T’Challa
Chadwick Boseman was probably the MCU’s most significant breakout star since Robert Downey Jr., but his passing in 2020 left Marvel with a major canonical headache leading up to 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. They kicked off the film with Angela Bassett delivering the bad news as T’Challa’s Queen mother.
‘Game of Thrones’: Stannis Baratheon
He was killed off in Season Five of the show, wrapping up the character’s arc before he was even dead in the books. Director David Nutter claimed his death (at the hands of Brienne of Tarth) was too “gratuitous” to show on-screen, as opposed to the reserved and justifiable deaths the show is known for.
‘Up’: Ellie
We knew it was a story about a grumpy, lonely old man, but we didn’t know Pixar was capable of making us feel so strongly about his wife in the scant 10-minute flashback that kicks off the film. Then we hard cut from her hospital bed to her casket, because we have a whole damn movie to get to.
‘Forrest Gump’: Jenny
Jenny wakes up from a nap, and Forrest has a rare moment of lucid, articulate poeticism, waxing on about the beauty of Vietnam between rainstorms and gunfire. She sneaks in two brief lines of dialogue before we hard cut to her gravesite, where Forest fills us in on what we missed: “You died on a Saturday morning.”
‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’: Joseph of Arimathea
King Arthur and his crew discover some cave writings that might help them on their quest: “Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of aaarrrrggh.”
They correctly deduce that Joseph died while carving his last words, and quickly find the culprit: The Black Beast of Aaaaaargghh. Animator Terry Gilliam is then shown dying on-screen of a heart attack, thus killing The Black Beast of Aaaaaargghh.
