Following The Resident's six-season run on Fox and in the midst of the series' rise in popularity thanks to its Netflix release in early March 2024, many are looking back to the series and wondering what happened with Nic as she left the story.
Telling the story of the fictional Chastain Park Memorial Hospital and its bureaucratic practices, The Resident featured Emily VanCamp in a key leading role as Nicolette "Nic" Nevin.
Nevin is a nurse practitioner at Chastain Park who later marries The Resident's main character, Matt Czuchry's Conrad Hawkins. She evolves as a character over her five years in the series.
Why Did Nic Leave The Resident?
Emily VanCamp was a series regular on The Resident from 2018 to 2022, playing nurse practitioner Nic Nevin.
Sadly, VanCamp left her position as a regular following her character's death in Season 5.
Season 5, Episode 2 ends with Conrad Hawkins being informed that Nic was involved in a horrific car crash as she returned home from a spa weekend. Episode 3 then dives headfirst into the ramifications of that crash.
Nic suffers a traumatic brain injury immediately upon being hit, and her condition only worsens from there as her brain herniates. The doctors are forced to declare Nic brain dead as her father, Kyle, places immense blame on Conrad for not being able to save her.
As Nic is confirmed as an organ donor, her organs are harvested for future transplants before she is taken off life support, leading to her death. Miraculously, her trachea is even used for a transplant for a patient she treated who suffered heavily from COVID-19, helping her story come full circle.
VanCamp would later return in flashback moments for The Resident's Season 5 finale, showing her and Conrad enjoying a night out before the birth of their daughter.
Emily VanCamp's Exit From The Resident Explained
The reasoning behind Emily VanCamp's exit largely revolved around the fact that she gave birth to her first child with her husband, former Revenge co-star Josh Bowman.
Deadline reported her leave from The Resident shortly after she gave birth, which she kept under the radar.
According to the news release, she had asked to be released from her obligations on The Resident at the end of Season 4, likely due to her pregnancy. There were reportedly conversations with Fox to potentially bring her back for a bigger role in Season 5, but they fell through.
Speaking with Deadline about her departure, she called her exit "such a bittersweet moment" as she made it clear she "loved doing The Resident so much" for four years. According to VanCamp, there was no bad blood whatsoever between her and the team as she expressed gratitude as she made the choice to leave:
"It’s such a bittersweet moment for me. I loved doing 'The Resident' so much for the four years I was on it. Oftentimes you hear about someone exiting a show because something bad had happened or there was some bad blood. But in this case, it’s the exact opposite. There’s nothing but love and respect between all of us and this decision was not an easy one for anybody but it was the right one for me, personally. I’m grateful that I was met with understanding and compassion."
Conversations about her departure began sometime before Season 5, with VanCamp noting she had reached a point in her life where it "becomes less about work and more about family:"
"We started talking about [my leaving] awhile ago. I spent so many years on network television, but then suddenly priorities shifted. I think there comes a moment in every woman’s life—in every person’s life—where it becomes less about work and more about family, and that’s what happened while I was making the show. Doing that many episodes in a different city and then you add Covid to that, most of us couldn’t see our families for almost a year. It really solidified for me that family is where my heart is at the moment."
TVLine also discussed VanCamp's exit from The Resident with co-showrunner Peter Elkoff and star/executive producer Matt Czuchry after Season 5, Episode 3.
When asked whether Nic could have transferred to another hospital instead of being killed, Elkoff explained how she could not logically leave her current job, husband, and child due to her devotion to her work and family:
"Well, first of all, how could she have gone to another hospital and not taken her child with her? It just felt like, to preserve this fictional character as alive in this fictional universe, it would create immense logic problems. Based on who that character was, it didn’t make sense. She was a devoted mother and a devoted nurse, Conrad’s wife, she had this incredible history at Chastain. Why would she a) leave the hospital, b) leave Conrad, c) leave her daughter? None of it made any logical sense for us."
He also felt having Conrad be a single widowed dad rather than divorced was "heartbreaking but also wonderful to watch" rather than simply sad, giving Czuchry a challenge as an actor as well:
"Also, doing what we did is the thing that packs an emotional punch. Conrad as a divorced dad, a part-time dad? That’s just sad. Conrad as a single father, raising a daughter, is heartbreaking but also wonderful to watch, you know? It felt to us like we had to do the thing that was true to the character that Emily created and Amy created in the writing, and tell a story that had the maximum amount of emotion and really put Conrad through the wringer. It gave him an opportunity to challenge himself — challenge the actor, Matt, and also the character as a single father."
Czuchry added that it was "essential" to have Conrad and Nic's relationship "come to a full conclusion," meaning there could not be a chance fans thought they could be back together again:
"That’s a complicated question. Having the Conrad and Nic relationship come to a full conclusion was essential. You couldn’t have the audience, in my opinion, ever thinking that Conrad and Nic can get back together. I think we’ve given the audience everything they could ever want from the Conrad and Nic relationship. We saw them go through things with patients, we saw them when Nic’s sister passed away, we saw them get married and have a child. I feel we’ve given everything to the audience in terms of exploring that, and again, now culminating in this exit that is both guttural and beautiful at the same time, a celebration of someone’s life."
This allowed "the characters to grow and change" while letting the audience "feel the grief and the sadness and the frustration and the disbelief" seen in that episode, all while Conrad goes through those same emotions:
"It needed to be that way because we couldn’t have the audience wishing or hoping that there was something out there that could happen between Conrad and Nic, because that doesn’t allow the characters to grow and change. I hope the audience was, number one, fulfilled by the 70-plus episodes of that relationship that we were able to give, but at the same time, I hope they feel the grief and the sadness and the frustration and the disbelief that happens in Episode 3, because that’s what Conrad is going through. He is the eyes of the audience, so I hope they feel all that."
