Charlie Barnett Says Being Written Off ‘Chicago Fire’ Was a “Blessing in Disguise”

Actor Charlie Barnett‘s career is having a moment right now. The second season of Russian Doll, the Netflix series in which Barnett stars with Natasha Lyonne, just premiered, and he also starred in Netflix’s Tales Of The City, the 2019 series based on the Armistead Maupin novels. Barnett also starred in the final season of the CW’s Arrow in 2019. And yet, in 2015, Barnett experienced what felt like a massive blow to his career when he was written off of Chicago Fire, the NBC show he starred on for three years.

On Chicago Fire, Barnett played a firefighting paramedic named Peter Mills who was eventually written off the show so that his character could return to his family home to live with him mother and sister. Barnett says of his dismissal from the wildly popular series, “It broke me for quite a long time.” Given his involvement in several high-profile, and creatively diverse projects in the time since he was written out of the NBC show, he explains that what happened was actually a good thing for him.

“It was a blessing in disguise, and they all told me that,” he said in a recent interview with Digital Spy. “You never really see that in life, in general. You never see the bad moments becoming the good. It wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be what it was, I think, if you did recognize it for what it is in the moment.”

Barnett’s career has certainly not suffered in the past few years, and it continues to thrive. He also appears on the NBC series Ordinary Joe and will star in the upcoming film We Are Gathered Here Today.