Why George Clooney Left NBC’s ER

These days, major Hollywood stars split their time between the small and big screens pretty reliably; hell, it seems like Nicole Kidman has a new TV project every other week (in a different wig, no less). Back in the 1990s and 2000s, though, television was regarded as a lesser medium, meaning that small-screen actors were constantly trying to become big movie stars and leave their TV roots firmly in the rearview mirror. That’s precisely why, after five seasons as Dr. Doug Ross, George Clooney left “ER” for greener, more cinematic pastures.

It probably sounds like an oversimplification to say that Clooney stopped playing Doug Ross so that he could focus on his film career, but that’s essentially … exactly what happened! Though Clooney made movies like “Out of Sight” and his often-maligned Caped Crusader flick “Batman & Robin” while playing Doug Ross, filming a network TV show with 20-odd episodes a season is a huge time commitment. With his eyes on the big screen, it makes sense that he decided to leave Chicago behind for Hollywood. So how did John Wells and the rest of the creative team behind “ER” write Doug Ross out of the overall narrative? Did Clooney ever return to reprise his role as Doug Ross? (Yes, twice; I’ll get to that.) I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with Clooney’s post-“ER” body of work, but still, we’ll go over all of that briefly. Here’s precisely how George Clooney left NBC’s hit medical drama “ER” and how his career ascended to astounding heights afterward.

Throughout his time on “ER,” Dr. Doug Ross — who starts the series as a pediatric fellow before becoming an attending in the field who specifically works in the emergency department — is an irreverent but extremely devoted doctor who will do absolutely anything to help his patients, and his impulse to shirk the rules to serve patients at any cost is exactly why he gets written out of the series. During season 5 of “ER,” Doug treats a young boy named Ricky Abbott (Kyle Chambers) who has a rare disease called adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD; Doug first crosses a boundary when he gives an experimental pain drug to Ricky, which could jeopardize the drug’s entire trial if anybody found out. (There is no cure for ALD.) 

Later, in the two-part episode “The Storm” — where Doug gets into a car accident with physician assistant Jeanie Boulet (Gloria Reuben) — Doug not-so-secretly allows Ricky’s mother to access the hospital’s locked supply of Dilaudid, a medication that ultimately leads to Ricky’s death after she administers it to end his suffering. To avoid any more scandal, Doug “moves to Seattle,” and Clooney’s last appearance on the series — as a regular — is in the second half of “The Storm.”

Even though George Clooney left “ER” to pursue a more lucrative and high-profile film career, he ultimately returned to the series twice, though his first time back was a small (and super-secret) cameo. In the season 6 episode “Such Sweet Sorrow,” Carol Hathaway — one of the first major “ER” characters played by Julianna Margulies — decides to move to Seattle to be with her on-again, off-again love Doug Ross, and at the very end of the episode, Doug isn’t played by a humble stand-in; he’s played by George Clooney himself. In a 2024 interview with the Television Academy, Marguiles said that showrunner John Wells somehow managed to make Clooney’s appearance a total secret, which really paid off — because when audiences saw it, they were shocked. “I remember my mom saying to me — she was so shocked because everyone knew George was off the show — my mother said she screamed, which I think was a lot of people’s reaction,” Marguiles recalled. “It was the right ending for them because Carol and Doug were destined to be together.”

In season 15 of “ER” — the final season of the long-running medical series, actually — both Marguiles and Clooney reappear in the episode “Old Times,” where they work together as a married couple at the University of Washington Medical Center. After they persuade a grieving grandmother, played by Susan Sarandon, to donate her grandson’s organs … but what they don’t know is that the kidney from that harvest goes to their old friend and colleague Dr. John Carter (Noah Wyle) in Chicago while he’s undergoing his own health crisis.

It’s safe to say that leaving “ER” was the right move for George Clooney because he’s now Hollywood royalty … and he might not have had time to become a movie star if he’d been stuck playing Doug Ross for years. After leaving the show in 2000, Clooney appeared in a pretty wide variety of successful films, including “The Perfect Storm” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” that same year; in the years that followed, he worked on everything from “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” to the “Ocean’s” franchise to “Up in the Air” to “The Monuments Men.” 

Clooney ultimately won his first Academy Award for his supporting role in “Syriana” in 2006 and his second for producing “Argo” in 2013, but he was nominated for his performances in “Michael Clayton,” “Up in the Air,” and “The Descendants,” and has appeared in major Best Picture frontrunners like Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 masterpiece “Gravity.” In recent years, Clooney has only taken a handful of roles, including in the romantic comedy “Ticket to Paradise” — which reunites him with his “Ocean’s” co-star Julia Roberts — and in the Apple TV+ buddy comedy “Wolfs” with his real-life friend Brad Pitt, but the venerable actor is also married (to human rights lawyer Amal Clooney) with two children, so he’s a little busy. In any case, you can watch him play Dr. Doug Ross on “ER” on Hulu now if you want to relive his small-screen days.