Why did Jessica leave Suits? She walked at the very top — and Gina Torres has explained why
Jessica Pearson left Suits after season 6, and Gina Torres has explained exactly why: an expired contract, a brutal Toronto commute, and a personal life that needed her. Here's the full story, plus the ending Aaron Korsh almost gave her.
Somewhere around season 6 of your Netflix Suits binge, the unthinkable happens: Jessica Pearson — the tallest, best-dressed, most quietly terrifying person in any given conference room — simply leaves. Not fired. Not killed. She just… goes to Chicago. And an entire generation of new viewers has been asking the same question ever since.
The real reason, from the woman herself
Good news: this is not one of those mysterious Hollywood exits where everyone smiles through gritted teeth. Gina Torres has been refreshingly blunt about it. As she told The New York Times, via SlashFilm:
"My contract was up, so this wasn't a power play that went terribly wrong."
The boring, human truth: Suits filmed in Toronto. Torres lived in Los Angeles with her daughter and her then-husband, Laurence Fishburne. After six seasons of commuting between the two, something had to give, and it wasn't going to be her family. "My personal life needed to be tended to," she said. Showrunner Aaron Korsh and the team were, by her account, fully supportive.
The exit she almost got (it involves a gun)
Here's where it gets fun. Korsh admitted to The Hollywood Reporter, via We Got This Covered, that one early idea for Jessica's ending was considerably more dramatic: a deranged character from a past case was going to "bring a gun and go nuts and kill her."
They did not do that. Thank god. Instead:
- Jessica takes the fall for Mike Ross's whole fake-lawyer situation and gets disbarred in New York;
- She leaves for Chicago with Jeff Malone, upright and victorious, on her own terms;
- Torres pops back for cameos in season 7, then gets her own spinoff, Pearson, in 2019 — which lasted one season, because the universe is unjust.
Why she skipped the series finale
One last wrinkle: Jessica isn't in the Suits finale, and that wasn't an accident either. Korsh told Entertainment Weekly, via Yahoo, that with Pearson airing back-to-back with Suits, having Jessica casually "yukking it up at a wedding" would have broken the spinoff's reality:
"I just didn't want to mess with the integrity of Pearson."
So no, there's no scandal here. Jessica Pearson left the way Jessica Pearson does everything: at the top, in heels, with the door held open behind her in case she ever feels like coming back.