‘Hawaii Five-0’ season 7: Masi Oka exits; Max to be written off
For those who love the Max character on “Hawaii Five-0,” we come bearing some particularly sad news: We’re going to be seeing the end of the road for him sooner rather than later.
After first joining the CBS series all the way back during the first season, Masi Oka confirmed to Entertainment Weekly in a new interview that he will be leaving in the upcoming 13th episode of the season as his character moves to Africa with his new wife Sabrina (Rumer Willis). He went on to explain why he felt like now was the right time to go, both for the character and for himself:
“I just thought the character went through a major journey. He got married, now he’s going off to Africa, so I think character-wise I felt like Max had done too much of everything he can do. And we’ve been so blessed to work for seven years on a great show, but a lot of my business has been in Los Angeles and Japan and it’s been increasingly difficult to really commute to Hawaii. I’m probably the only one who really commutes to Hawaii, maybe 18 times a year round trip. It got to the point where the producers were very gracious enough to — like we talked about it and we thought Max was entering his journey and they allowed me, kind of like for my health as well, to be able to take a reprieve from being on the show.”
We cannot say that we were altogether surprised to hear this news — we wondered at the end of last season if the producers were writing Max out of the show then, and we got the sense interviewing him last year for “Heroes: Reborn” that doing the show was a toll on him with everything else he had going on. It’s not meant to be a slam on the writers or anyone he works with, as he has nothing but nice things to say about them in the interview linked above; it just feels like for him in particular, filming in this part of the country while doing a ton of other things proved to be excruciatingly demanding.
This isn’t the only news related to “Hawaii Five-0” and departures that is worth noting; much has been made as of late about talk that Alex O’Loughlin (Steve McGarrett) could be leaving the show at the conclusion of a potential eighth season.
Thoughts on the departure of Oka from the show? Be sure to share now in the attached comments!