Westworld Star Breaks Silence on Surprise HBO Cancellation

Westworld fans were shocked to learn that the series had been cancelled earlier this month, bringing its epic and globe-trotting story to a close after four seasons. The news definitely came as a surprise to the HBO series' ensemble cast, who will reportedly still be paid for what was poised to be the show's fifth and probably-final season. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, Ashley Stubbs actor Luke Hemsworth spoke out about the cancellation, as as well as the colorful reaction he gave when learning about it on his birthday, saying "I was like, 'F**k! Dammit!'"

"You hope these things go forever, but everyone's got their own reasons," Hemsworth explained. "I'm very thankful for my part in that series and that journey was a big part of my life, but yeah it was disappointing."

"I think the idea right from the start was to go full circle and come back to be about loops, to be about human beings and robots being stuck in that trajectory," Hemsworth continued. "Unfortunately, we get cut off, but it's the nature of the world. You can't get depressed about it. You move on and it opens up new doors."

Why did HBO cancel Westworld?

Reports surrounding the cancellation of Westworld hinted that it was due to the series underperforming on both HBO and its HBO Max streaming service. This was definitely disheartening to those who had been passionately following the series, especially as its crew had hinted that the fifth season would be the show's grand finale.

"We always planned for a fifth and final season," Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan said during New York Comic-Con last month. "We are still in conversations with the network. We very much hope to make them."

"We never broke [the show] with an exact number of seasons left," co-creator Lisa Joy said in a previous interview. "But then when we were writing this season, we were like, 'We can get it up to the precipice before we round it out with what we had always planned would happen in the fifth season.' So we have, like Dolores [Evan Rachel Wood], one more story to tell – and whether we get to tell it, we'll see."

"We always had this idea that, in the last season, we would let the person who was at the whim of other people's stories and predilections and desires to be able to write a story of her own and really flip the test back," Joy added. "In terms of a launching pad for that [in season 5], the old regimes and the old world and a lot of the old players have been dismantled and destroyed [in season 4]. So, in this final test, what is Dolores gonna do? How will the world look different? How will she, as the final tester, create a different universe in a different game and a different way?"

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