Jason Biggs Was Fired From Nickelodeon’s ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Due to Controversial Tweets

Actor Jason Biggs has confirmed that he was fired from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series on Nickelodeon on 2014 due to a series of offensive tweets, sharing the story with Dax Shepard on Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert.

“I got in trouble [on Twitter] a lot,” Biggs told Shepard. “And I took the stance for a long time of, like, ‘whatever, f— you, I’m not doing anything wrong.’ And mind you, this sort of coincided with my last years of drinking. My brain was pickled, and I definitely had a sort of combative side to me that I think the booze and drugs obviously [made worse].”

“I was let go from a job. It was for real,” he continued. “I’m fine with it now, but I think it really f—ed me up. And for awhile, initially, I didn’t think I did anything wrong…but the truth of the matter is, I f—ing did it…it f—ed me up.”

During his time on TMNT, Biggs was tweeting about a number of controversial topics including the Pope, a Bachelorette contestant who had died, politician Paul Ryan’s wife, Malaysian airlines and women’s basketball, among others.

He noted on the podcast that he was aware that the network was not pleased with his tweets, but he simply doubled down and defended what he had said.

“It was enough to get a lot of people calling Nickelodeon,” Biggs recalled of his behavior. “I knew they weren’t thrilled with them. That should’ve been enough. It wasn’t. I tweeted more. I doubled down, and they were like, ‘We can’t do this anymore. Our phone is literally ringing off the hook.’”

Biggs had been voicing the character of Leonardo since TMNT began in 2012, and was replaced by Seth Green after he was fired.

“It really traumatized me,” Biggs said of his firing, though he admitted that “it was a really good thing” in the end as it made him realize that if he wanted to continue his career, he needed to put a lid on the controversial tweets. In addition, his wife, Jenny Mollen, got pregnant, spurring Biggs to become sober.

Since his time on TMNT, Biggs has worked on a number of projects including The Good Wife, its spinoff The Good Fight, and films Who We Are Now and Dear Dictator. He also played Larry Bloom on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black for multiple seasons before his character was written out of the show.

Photo Credit: Getty / Noam Galai