Why did Nicholas Gonzalez leave 'The Good Doctor'? The actor, who plays Dr. Meléndez at the show, is not returning for the upcoming fourth season.
Though The Good Doctor is making a extremely anticipated go back for Season 4 on Nov. 2, there is one familiar face who will be absent from the personnel on the St. Bonaventure Hospital.
The ABC scientific drama centers around Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore), a renowned surgeon who's autistic, during his residency at the health facility. His professional and personal relationships with the other surgeons and the operations themselves drive much of the plot.
One beloved persona on the display has been Dr. Neil Meléndez (Nicholas Gonzalez), an attending cardiothoracic surgeon who ran the residency program at St. Bonaventure. In the Season 3 finale, audience discovered that Dr. Meléndez would not be working on the hospital, and that Nicholas Gonzalez used to be leaving the series.
Why did Nicholas Gonzalez leave The Good Doctor? Warning: SPOILERS for the Season 3 finale are forward.
Why did Nicholas Gonzalez leave 'The Good Doctor'?
Throughout the third season, viewers yearned for readability on the burgeoning romance between Dr. Meléndez and Dr. Claire Brown (Antonia Thomas) after his breakup with Dr. Audrey Lim (Christina Chang).
In the penultimate episode of Season 3, which is entitled "Hurt," a couple of medical doctors attend a brewery tour hosted via one in all Meléndez's former sufferers. When an earthquake happens, several maintain accidents, together with Meléndez.
Though his preliminary accidents are minimum, Meléndez collapses when an aftershock hits.
In the finale episode ("I Love You"), the other surgeons be told that Meléndez has inner bleeding, and that he has bowel damage that can not be fastened. After he and Claire speak about their love for one every other, Meléndez dies. His demise shocked fanatics of The Good Doctor, and plenty of puzzled why the actor had departed from the popular sequence.
David Shore, the chief producer and showrunner, spoke with Deadline about Meléndez's demise. He defined that the demise served to remind the opposite characters and the target market contributors that tragedy is a very actual a part of life.
"When you do a series like this, you want to confront mortality. That's what the series does," he shared with the opening. "You need bad results every now and again to keep things honest and keep the audience believing that bad things are going to happen, just because you want to be honest, and because you want to put people in those positions."
The characters' responses to tragedy too can shed new gentle on how they relate to one another.
"You want to see how people react to bad news, as well as good. So, you want, every now and again, bad things to happen, and to see the fallout from it. That's what you want to explore as an audience; that's what you want people to feel," he continued.
But, there wasn't bad blood between actor Nicholas Gonzalez and the staff on The Good Doctor.
"Nick was so great, but you want to go where the stories take you," David added.
As for the rationale Meléndez was chosen to constitute the "bad results" side of the display, David mentioned that "none of it is personal."
"I'd rather not go into it, particularly. None of it is personal," he explained. "You know, Nick was fantastic, and there's nothing I can say to you that will make you go, 'Oh, yeah. OK. It had to be that way.'"
Because Meléndez had a relationship (both romantically or platonically) with a number of of the primary characters, David famous that his demise could be a in particular large loss.
"We wanted to lose a character that we would feel something about, and feel pain about, and certainly, he’s a character that so many of them have been in touch with," David mentioned.
"Look, this is the nature of these sorts of shows, I believe, is you go forward, and people come and go. It's a dynamic being, the show. New characters are going to come, old characters are going to leave, and we feel the pain when they leave, and we feel excitement when they come," the showrunner said to Deadline. "All of it is designed to give us an opportunity to explore different relationships."
Nicholas Gonzalez knew his personality's destiny towards the end of Season 3.
The choice to kill off Meléndez was once made by means of The Good Doctor manufacturers and writers, however Nicholas Gonzalez used to be mindful throughout the latter a part of the third season that his time was once coming to an end.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in March of 2020, Nicholas Gonzalez discussed how he got the inside track about "two thirds" of the way in which into Season 3, and he used to be first of all "sad" about it.
"You know, we try to cram in some character here and there, and of course there's a lot of personal stories, but we still have two cases a week and major surgeries that our episodes are formed around. So to me, it's been nothing but a blessing," the actor said about his time on the display.
When the collection began in 2017, Nicholas was once going thru some changes in his private lifestyles as smartly.
"It's something that I literally built a family on," he defined. "You know, I got married, [and] we were pregnant with our first right when I did this job. I left to go shoot the pilot when my baby was 6 days old, and we moved to Vancouver when she was 5 months old. Now she's 3 years old and we just had her birthday. This has been an amazing whirlwind ride, and I'm sad to see him go. I think there's definitely going to be a void left there, but I'm excited to see what everyone does with it."
Nicholas admitted that shooting his ultimate scenes on The Good Doctor was "tough."
"It's tough to say goodbye to a character like that I felt was just a moral, upstanding, clear-cut, honest person that we never sullied, not in the least bit, and that's tough in this day and age," he mentioned. "I'm proud of what we did with him, but yes, it was tough to finally read those final words."
The actor is next set to appear within the mystery movie Borrego, which additionally stars Lucy Hale. The movie is slated for a 2021 free up.
Season Four of The Good Doctor premieres on Nov. 2. New episodes air on Mondays at 10 p.m. on ABC.
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