A new side of the story. Colton Haynes opened up about why he left Teen Wolf — and he says the reason is different from what was reported at the time.
“The real truth was that they didn’t want to pay me the same amount as everyone else,” the Arrow alum, 33, wrote in his new memoir, Miss Memory Lane, which dropped on Tuesday, May 31. “Which wasn’t a lot to begin with by Hollywood standards, even though my working quote — the fee I would be paid to appear on anyone else’s show — was higher than most of the cast’s.”
The Kansas native left the MTV series in 2012 after the second season. At the time, an insider told Us Weekly that he exited the show because producers only wanted him in half of the third season’s episodes. “It’s not that he didn’t want to return because he did,” the source added.
According to Haynes, the crew also had issues with his team, which he alleged caused the network not to pay him what he felt he deserved. “It didn’t help that I was represented by a team of people who made the Teen Wolf production’s life a living hell,” he wrote. “So in order to get back at my team, the production refused to pay me the standard salary.”
The American Horror Story alum also claimed that he nearly didn’t get the Teen Wolf role to begin with because of his previous participation in a photo shoot for a gay magazine. Haynes wrote that showrunner Jeff Davis fought for him to be on the show in spite of the pictures. “I was grateful to him, and eager not to f–k up the opportunity,” the actor wrote.
After Teen Wolf, the former model went on to star as Roy Harper in The CW’s Arrow, but in his memoir, he alleged that his time on that show was also affected by internal disputes. Haynes left the show at the end of season 7 and announced that he would only return in a limited capacity for the eighth and final season.
“I had walked away from my full-time job on Arrow at the beginning of the year, supposedly because my contract had ended, but it was really because I was too depressed and I couldn’t stand working with one of my castmates,” he wrote. Haynes did not specify which cast member he was talking about.
In September 2021, Paramount+ announced a Teen Wolf revival movie due out sometime in 2022. Haynes is set to reprise his role as Jackson Whittemore alongside Tyler Posey, Crystal Reed, Holland Roden and more.
Us Weekly has reached out to MTV for comment.
