Bill Paxton was not happy when first reading through the script for the final episode of “Big Love.” One of the show’s producers, Mark Olsen, revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that, “Bill had trouble that his character was going to die. It’s not how he envisioned the end of his character’s journey nor the end of the series.”
In an interview with us here at TVLine, Olsen explained, “[Bill Paxton] felt really bad that his character had to die. He spent six years in the skin of that character. It wasn’t a vanity thing, it had to do with the kind of love and custodianship he felt toward his character.” It took Bill Paxton a few weeks to come around to the idea that Bill Henrickson, the character he had played for five seasons and one of his best TV roles, would be killed off.
Speaking to HuffPost in 2012, Paxton explained why the ending to one of HBO’s best series disappointed him. “I’m still a little unreconciled. Maybe it’s because I was very fond of Bill Henrickson,” he said. Paxton added, “I just wanted to think of Henricksons still out there fighting, and f***ing, and praying … I guess society can’t reward that guy, because he is really living outside of society … I thought that after all that he had gone through, he deserved to find a quiet place in the sun.”
Why was Bill Henrickson killed off?
It’s a big swing to kill off your main character in the series finale, but Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer defended their choice to end the show with Bill Henrickson getting shot in the street by an angry neighbor. They explained, “The decision came from a desire to look at all of our characters and try and find the most positive spin on their journey.” To find the right ending, they reflected on what defined Paxton’s character. “‘What could be the most important testament to the life that that character has lived on the planet Earth?’ And it’s not that he had two hardware stores. And it’s not that he had a casino. It’s that he created a family that endured. And we thought the best way of establishing that was seeing that the family continues after he’s gone.” (Via TVLine).
Will Scheffer told NPR that “Big Love” was ultimately more of a “feminist show,” despite “dramatizing this very patriarchal system.” “The opportunities that women found — particularly in this very abusive system — to support each other was what drew us to the material in the first place … We felt that there were opportunities for women to find support in one another,” he said. Bill Paxton eventually came to share this viewpoint, telling HuffPost, “The series really was about the women. I was kind of a fiduciary character in many ways … How do these women relate to each other, sharing this guy and this religion and this whole thing?” Despite his initial resistance, Paxton came to see Bill Henrickson’s death as one “hell of a hero’s journey,” and found beauty in the ending’s tragic nature.
