Video ‘Boy Meets World’ star Will Friedle credits one thing for keeping him in Hollywood The "Doc Meets World" star spoke with Fox News Digital at Tribeca Festival about nearly leaving Hollywood and the lasting passion that kept drawing him back.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan's miserable experience playing an alien on "Star Trek: Enterprise" nearly convinced him to quit acting for good.
Long before his breakout roles on "Supernatural" and "Grey's Anatomy," Morgan appeared as a Xindi alien named Damron on the sci-fi series — a job that required extensive prosthetics and left the actor struggling with claustrophobia.
"I hated it so much," Morgan recalled during an appearance on Josh Horowitz's "Happy Sad Confused" podcast. "I was like, 'That's it. I've got to do something else.'"
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Morgan said he sometimes spent 14 hours a day in the prosthetics and had difficulty eating while wearing them.
"I remember I was so claustrophobic," he said. "It just was an experience that I want to forget, and I still wake up sweating about it."
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The experience came during an already tricky period in Morgan's career.
"I was always, always side hustling," Morgan said, recalling that he would build fences and take other jobs that "usually involved hammers."
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Walking away from Hollywood, however, presented its own problem.
"I was like, done, but at the same time I was like, 'What am I going to do?'" Morgan said. "I don't know anything else."
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Morgan said he had reached his mid-30s without an education or an obvious backup career and had begun to believe acting simply wasn't going to work out.
The actor was once told that he had "aged out" of Hollywood.
His longtime manager then dropped him, telling him, "You've aged out, bro."
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But Morgan's fortunes soon changed dramatically.
Around age 38, he landed roles on "Supernatural," "Grey's Anatomy" and "Weeds" within roughly the same period — finally getting his breakthrough after years of struggling to stay in the business.
He currently stars as Negan opposite Lauren Cohan's Maggie in the third season of AMC's "The Walking Dead: Dead City," which premiered July 26. Morgan is also an executive producer on the series.
Christina Dugan Ramirez is an entertainment journalist with more than 15 years of experience, including a decade at PEOPLE writing high-profile cover stories, covering Hollywood's biggest events, and interviewing many of the industry's most influential stars before joining Fox News Digital in 2024.
