Why did Common leave Hell on Wheels? Don't blame the writers
When Elam Ferguson died in season 4 of Hell on Wheels — shot by his best friend, no less — plenty of fans pointed the finger at the writers' room. Some threatened to stop watching entirely. They were aiming at the wrong target. Here's what really happened.
It was Common's decision
The exit was requested by Common himself. Just before Christmas 2013, after season 3 had wrapped, the rapper-actor called showrunner John Wirth and said he thought it was time to leave the show. The reason was music.
Filming Hell on Wheels meant spending months every year in Calgary, and that schedule made it nearly impossible to sustain his Grammy-winning recording career and touring.
He told Deadline in 2014:
"It wasn't the easiest thing for me to do."
Acting mattered to him, he explained — but so did music, and the two had become impossible to balance. Wirth, for his part, admitted the call crushed him at first, though he later said the shake-up reinvigorated the entire writing staff.
How Elam was written out
Wirth's rule was blunt: nobody leaves Hell on Wheels alive. So Elam got a tragic end, stretched across two seasons:
- Season 3 finale ( 2013) — Elam rides out to find Cullen Bohannon and is mauled by a bear. Fans spend a year assuming he's dead.
- Season 4, episode 6 (September 2014) — a full episode reveals he survived. A Comanche tribe nursed him back to health, but the attack left him with severe brain damage.
- Season 4, episode 7 (September 2014) — a violent, unrecognizable Elam returns to town. Bohannon (Anson Mount) is forced to shoot him. A mercy killing.
Wirth said he wanted zero ambiguity in that final scene — Bohannon had to have no other option. Having the hero kill his closest friend was risky television, and the show did it mid-season rather than saving it for a finale, which made it land even harder.
No hard feelings
Common played Elam from the 2011 pilot — a freed slave working on the Transcontinental Railroad — through three and a half seasons, and called the character's death something that pulled at his heart. Had he wanted to stay, Wirth made clear, Elam would have lasted to the very end of the series in 2016.
The gamble on music paid off quickly.
Within months of leaving, Common co-wrote "Glory" for the film Selma — and won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 2015.