“He’s furious.” Jason Alexander “threatened to quit” Seinfeld after he was left out of a season 3 episode
Jason Alexander was outraged when his character was not included in one episode from Seinfeld season 3. He even started “threatening to quit.”.
Seinfeld was a story about a pack of friends whose stories we learned over the seasons. And because it was a TV series focusing on a group of people, the main cast was convinced that their roles were equal, so one star was surprised to learn that she had been left out of a season 3 episode.
Jason Alexander was missing from the episode titled The Pen, which angered the actor enough that he began threatening to quit. Michael Richards, who was also not included in the aforementioned episode, described that outburst in his biography Entrances and Exits (via Page Six).
But Jason threatens to quit after learning that he’s also not in the episode. He’s furious. Jason came onto the show with the most confidence of anyone. He had won a Tony Award on the New York stage, not an insignificant achievement, and until the table read for The Pen, he has assumed that Seinfeld is a buddy show, starring him and Jerry. But this business breeds both massive egos and incredible insecurity, and this episode is one of those ego-jarring wakeup calls.
Richards' biography, however, is not the only place where that incident was mentioned. It's also described in Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything, where it's mentioned how Alexander told head screenwriter Larry David that if they were going to leave him out, they had best get rid of him from the TV series altogether. David tried to talk to the actor, but Alexander wouldn't listen about the fact that it's not always easy to include stories for all the characters in one episode.
Don’t tell me your problems. If you don’t need me here, I don’t want to be here.
After time, Alexander realized his mistake and in an interview with Access Hollywood confessed that he was grateful to David for not listening to him and not firing him.
Thank God he didn’t say “Take a hike,” because I would have had no life and no career.
The actor with this one outburst could have doomed his future in Seinfeld, but this did not happen. Alexander, despite that situation, continued to appear in the sitcom until season 9.
More:Upcoming films and series with David Corenswet, the new Superman