‘The 100’ season 3: Ricky Whittle talks leaving show, issues with Jason Rothenberg
On this past episode of “The 100,” we had what is yet another extremely-sad death in Lincoln. Just weeks after the show lost Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey), another valuable character in Lincoln (Ricky Whittle) ended up losing his life when he opted to make a major sacrifice.
This week, he certainly had quite a bit to say about. Speaking in a new interview with AfterBuzz, Whittle started things off by saying that he didn’t want his comments about his experience with creator Jason Rothenberg to soil fans’ opinions on the show, or the cast and crew:
“There’s several reasons why I’m here today. There’s none of this shade business, I don’t want to witch-hunt … I don’t stand for bullying bullies. It’s not about that. I hate hearing this craziness over social media, people hating other people, ‘ships hating other ‘ships … Let’s just promote the show. My message is keeping watching ‘The 100.’ That’s my family. I want to promote that you keep supporting my cast, my crew.”
From here, Whittle did go on to explain a little bit regarding what happened:
“Jason Rothenberg abused his position to make my job untenable. What he did was disgusting, and he should be ashamed. A lot was said over something my mum said on Twitter, but everything she said is true. He was professionally bullying me, cutting out all storylines that I was supposed to be doing, cutting lines, trying to make my character as insignificant as possible, to the point where it was starting to get me down. Fortunately I was surrounded by an incredible cast, and we always looked out for each other. Every time a script would come through, I would see nothing for Lincoln. It’s not about screen time … It was why he didn’t have screen time [that was the issue].
“I approached other producers [who were on set] and asked ‘what’s going on, why am I being treated like this,’ and the producer was like ‘you need to speak to him. I don’t know what his problems are with you’ … I went down [to see him in Santa Monica] twice in previous seasons. It wasn’t the first time I tried to leave; I tried to leave in season 2 and Warner Bros. and The CW wouldn’t allow it … Everyone was nothing but nice.”
You can watch the full interview below; there’s a lot of juicy stuff still ahead!
Update: Rothenberg just released the following statement: “Ricky Whittle is a talented actor; I appreciate his work on The 100 and wish him all the best moving forward on American Gods.” (You can read more of our take on this here.)
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