Silicon valley actor dies today8/30/2023 ![]() “It was difficult.” While the original script for the season 1 finale didn’t use Peter much, he had a key moment at the end of the episode, telling the Pied Piper crew that he was now back in their corner, which set up the story for next season. “When we came in the first day of the second season, we were like, ‘How do we deal with this?’” says Judge. When the writers’ room opened this season, the immediate order of business was to figure out a proper way to bid farewell to the character. The rattled producers temporarily shelved several self-driving car and private island scenes with Peter and Jared (Zach Woods), which were later rewritten and filmed as a solo journey for Woods, and they opted to station Peter off-screen while they figured out a permanent solution. ![]() “That I had to go to set the next day was just this weird thing,” says Crew, “and what was great was that we were all kind of going through it together.” In between scenes, we would hang out and he would show me pictures of his kids.” The actors bonded through their grief and disbelief as production continued that week. “He was such a down-to-earth, no-walls kind of guy. “When that happened, I was gutted,” says Amanda Crew, who had shared the bulk of her scenes with Welch up to that point. “There was no indication that anything was wrong.” Cast members recall a man who was optimistic about his new gig-Miller recalls that Welch felt that his Silicon role was some of the best work he’d done in his career-and one who was a pleasure to work with. ![]() “He seemed to have bounced back completely,” remembers Judge. Silicon Valley co-creator Mike Judge had heard that Welch suffered a relapse in the months of downtime between shooting the pilot and the rest of season 1, but was supposedly cancer-free again when the show resumed production. I think Chris was very, very adept at hiding his ailment. Seconds Thomas Middleditch (Richard): “I mean, it came out of nowhere. “My wife, Kate, and I had made plans to have a barbecue with him and his family a few days before, and then he was just gone,” says T.J. The news stunned the cast and producers, most of whom knew that he’d been battling cancer but were under the impression that he had beaten it-after all, the man they saw on set was lively and upbeat, even scheduling social engagements right up until his death. (Required viewing: The scene from “Articles of Incorporation” below in which he examines every item on the Burger King menu laid out on his desk as if they were specimens from another planet before suddenly speaking eloquently of cicada cycles in Myanmar and Brazil and explaining how to make tens of millions of dollars on Indonesian sesame seed futures.) He was three days away from beginning work on the sixth episode when he died suddenly. Welch appeared in only a handful of episodes of Silicon Valley last season, yet was already earning a scene-stealer on set, infusing that odd-duck of a character with a dry, laconic, idiosyncratic, stilted-genius energy. (“He hadn’t run in a long time, maybe ever, and he just… that was it.”) The end of the episode gave us Peter’s grandiose memorial service-and closure-blending emotional moments (Gavin tearfully bidding goodbye to his old friend-turned-bitter rival) with industry-tweaking ones (“That’s just the kind of guy he was-warm, generous, and not disappointed in Snapchat,” eulogized Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel while defending his app against a previous speaker’s swipe that Peter was not happy with his investment in the company.) By the time the PowerPoint presentations were over and the doves had been released by Gavin (Matt Ross), a level of catharsis had been achieved. Miller) asked Monica (Amanda Crews) how her boss had died, and Monica, numb with sadness, would give them a strand of information about a hippo attack during his safari before trailing off, leaving the pair to keep trying to finish her sentence, before she finally revealed his soft demise. ![]() ![]() Yang), and then the details were slowly doled out in an extended leave-you-hanging gag: Richard (Thomas Middleditch) and Erlich (T.J. Peter’s death was first revealed with a tossed-off comment by a head-buried-in-his-phone Jian (Jimmy O. Sunday’s episode of HBO’s tech world satire, titled “Sand Hill Shuffle,” managed to thread a tiny, moving needle, which was to reverently send off this character-and by proxy, the respected 48-year-old character actor ( The Master, Law & Order)-in an appropriately irreverent, quirky manner. Gregory, as you know, was played to eccentric perfection by Christopher Evan Welch, who, as you probably know, died of complications from lung cancer in the middle of filming last season. ![]()
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