How Getting Fired From 90210 Turned Hilary Swank's Career Around For The Better
In 1997, Hilary Swank joined the main cast of "Beverly Hills, 90210" as single mother Carly Reynolds. Before too long, though, Carly was given something resembling the Tasha Yar treatment. She was written out of the show after a mere 16 episodes despite being introduced as a prominent new character, with Swank quietly fired behind the scenes. Obviously, this was devastating to the actor at the time. However, given what she did shortly after the fact, it's safe to say that Swank's "90210" axing was a blessing in disguise.
Following her final appearance as Carly, in early 1998, Swank landed the lead role in Kimberly Peirce's 1999 directorial debut "Boys Don't Cry." And while Swank was only paid $3,000 for this iconic role, since the flick was produced on a shoestring budget, her performance won Swank the Oscar for best actress at the 72nd Academy Awards in 2000. And, if you ask her one-time "90210" co-star Tori Spelling, who played Donna Martin in all 10 seasons of the teen drama, this paints the actor's shock exit in a very different light.
Spelling recalled the day Swank was let go during an April 2026 episode of her and Jennie Garth's "90210MG" podcast. "I just remember — and I'm not going to get this wording correct — she was like, 'Oh my god, if I get fired off of 90210, I'm never gonna make it,'" the actor said. "The ironic thing is, if she had stayed on '90210,' she would not have been able to audition for 'Boys Don't Cry.' She would not have been able to get that role, do that role, and then win an Academy Award." Swank later added a second Oscar to her shelf, winning best actress again in 2005 for "Million Dollar Baby." Would she have done so otherwise?
Why was Hilary Swank fired in the first place?
While Hilary Swank's abrupt firing from "Beverly Hills, 90210" indisputably worked out in her favor in the long run, why exactly was she let go in the first place? From what we can gather, there are a number of potential explanations. During an interview with Star 2 Entertainment, in April 2018, the Oscar winner detailed being told by producers that the character of Carly Reynolds was simply "not working," (via Us Weekly). "And I couldn't move. I was like, 'What's not working? Me? Am I bad? I'm not working because I'm bad?'" Swank went on to explain that Carly's relationship with long-established character Steve Sanders (Ian Ziering) apparently wasn't playing well with the show's audience.
The "Million Dollar Baby" star previously discussed her character's inability to connect with the "BH90210" faithful — or, rather, former faithful — on "Conan" in 2014, partially attributing it to the fact that she was a late-series addition. "I was on '90210' in the eighth season when no one watched it anymore, and Luke Perry was long gone," she pointed out. Tori Spelling, on the other hand, actually seemed to blame the show's writers for Swank's quick firing, as she reckons they wrote Carly in such a way that she was bound to turn off viewers from day one.
"I didn't think the writing was great in [Swank's first] episode," Spelling opined during a November 2025 episode of "90210MG." Podcast producer Amy Sugarman concurred, admitting that she, too, had long fallen victim to the misconception that Swank's acting in the show was simply bad. "It's not that she wasn't good. She actually is good. It's that they wrote her so ridiculously. Like, she comes in hot. She's kind of awful from the start," Sugarman argued.