Actor Taye Diggs will be departing CW’s All American.
On Monday, Taye Diggs’s character was written off in a surprising season 5 plot twist.
The life of former NFL star Spencer Paysinger served as the inspiration for the sports drama All American. The show centers on Spencer James (Daniel Ezra), a South Los Angeles high school football player who gets recruited to play for Beverly Hills High.
Diggs has been playing Billy Baker, the football coach at Beverly Hills High since the show premiered in 2018.
“It has been such an honor to work with Taye over these last five seasons and to watch him bring such incredible life to the role of Billy Baker,” showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll said. “It has truly been a gift for me and my fellow writers to write a character that was equally flawed and heroic. Billy was all of us, and what a joy it was to watch this character grow as he raised his kids and his football players as one big family. We wish Taye the very best in this next chapter of his life, and he remains a beloved member of the All-American family, so you haven’t seen the last of Billy Baker.”
“It became a mutual thing of we have an opportunity to do something that no one is going to expect. Does this feel like the right time to do it? We both felt like it was,” Carroll said.
“Even though it was so far in advance, I already knew that whenever it would happen, that this was how I was going to do it. I pitched it to him like I was pitching an episode, beat by beat, even though it was still easily a year away,” she added. “He was like, ‘It feels like the right time, and it feels like the right way to do it.’ It just felt right for both of us.”
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