Farewell, Mike Ross.
Patrick J. Adams is revealing why he quit “Suits” after seven seasons.
“I wasn’t taking good care of my mental health and I was drinking too much come the end of seventh season,” the actor, 43, said on Tuesday’s episode of the “Dinner’s On Me” podcast hosted by Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
“I was in a zone of living a pretty unexamined life. Was pretty miserable [and] I would say, pretty depressed,” Adams added.
Adams played college dropout turned lawyer Mike Ross on “Suits.” He left the USA Network series after Season 7 in 2018, alongside Meghan Markle (who played Rachel Zane) and Gina Torres (who played Jessica Pearson).
“I didn’t have the tools to deal with that depression beyond just spending money and drinking too much, you know, and not really knowing how to talk about it or in therapy sort of, but not really doing it,” Adams explained on the podcast. “You know what I mean? Like, there are all these things that I knew I needed to probably be doing and I wasn’t doing.”
“I would numb myself [to] deal with my insecurity and my fears,” Adams, who is now sober, went on. “And they just weren’t working. And they were taking a toll on my relationship, for sure, but also just making me a very not present father. That for me was a breaking point when I was like, ‘I think I should stop drinking probably, because I don’t wanna be that dad.’”
Adams has two daughters, Aurora, 6, and Elliot, 3, with his wife of eight years, “Pretty Little Liars” star Troian Bellisario.
He said on the podcast that “the best thing” he’s ever done was give up drinking.
“It just needed to happen in order for all these other things to happen,” he shared.
“There was really no way I was gonna take my mental health seriously, take my physical health seriously, work on my marriage, work on my friendships, you know, deal with my fears and my anxiety,” the actor continued. “I just couldn’t have done any of it if alcohol was still in the picture.”
To focus on his sobriety, Adams walked away from “Suits” and did not star in the final two seasons of the show — a decision that he said he never regretted.
“The only reason to stay was… money,” Adams explained. “I didn’t know what else to offer. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think about the money [Gabriel Macht] made those last two years, but I never regretted the decision for a second. I knew it was the right thing for my marriage, which I was not married at the time, but we were getting married. We got married in 2016.”
“And we had been away from each other for seven years,” he noted about his relationship with Bellisario, 39. “We’ve been together the whole time, ‘Suits’ had been on, and it was l time. We had been long distance for long enough. It was time for us to start our lives.”
“Suits” aired from 2011 to 2019. The show had a surge in viewership via Netflix last year, which sparked the making of the upcoming spinoff “Suits: L.A.” premiering in February on NBC.
Adams also capitalized on the show’s newfound success by starting a “Suits” rewatch podcast with co-star Sarah Rafferty in September.
Since leaving “Suits,” Adams has stayed close with the rest of the cast. He and Bellisario even attended the 2018 royal wedding between Markle, 43, and Prince Harry.
