‘Sons of Anarchy’ Star Reveals He Was Fired From the Show Early On

One Sons of Anarchy star nearly didn’t appear in the show at all.

Emilio Rivera revealed that he got fired from the show very early on.

The actor recurred as Marcus Alvarez throughout all seven seasons of the FX crime drama, and starred in the spinoff, Mayans M.C. However, at first, he wasn’t supposed to appear at all. While appearing on the podcast Taboo’s Comics & Kicks, Rivera told the Black Eyed Peas member that for the pilot of Sons of Anarchy, his name was Hawk, he cut necks, and he would get the job done.

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“And what happened was when they saw the pilot, I guess it didn’t make sense to them, either,” Rivera recalled. “So they called me, they said, ‘Emilio, I got good news and bad news. Bad news is they fired you from Sons of Anarchy.’ ‘Okay, better have some good news, home boy, that’s no good. A series regular job.’ ‘The good news is that they want you for Marcus Alvarez.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ I go, ‘Is the money the same?’”

Rivera went on to explain that he was told that the pay was not as high as before, and he turned it down, but they kept coming back to him, each time the pay was a little bit higher. The negotiation was going back and forth, and on the final round, Rivera shared that his wife, Yadi Valerio, told him to take the job. “‘Show them who the f— you are,’ she told me like that, homeboy,” he said. “That’s my wife. And it worked out, bro.”

Even if the role he ended up getting was not the one he wanted, it turned out to be a good thing. While he only recurred and was not a series regular, Marcus turned out to be essential to Sons of Anarchy for a variety of reasons. The biggest being that he went on to recur in the first season of spinoff Mayans M.C. before being promoted to the main cast starting with Season 2 onward. So if not for his wife, who knows what could have happened. It wouldn’t be surprising if Valerio has continued to remind him of what she did when it came to Sons of Anarchy, because it would be great ammunition to use during an argument.