Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | September 10, 2026
This is a very random post, but while I was writing my review of Chad Powers earlier this week, I decided to look up Clayne Crawford, who plays an assistant coach in the series. Some may recall Crawford from Rectify, an absolutely brilliant, heartbreaking, melancholic series that ran on AMC for four seasons in the early to mid-2010s. Crawford was one of its stars, and he was honestly just this enormous talent.
Subsequent to that, he was cast opposite Damon Wayans on Fox’s Lethal Weapon series, a television show that was light, entertaining, and better than it had any right to be. Crawford played the Mel Gibson role, and honestly, he was very good in a light-lift role with which he provided some depth. The production, however, was troubled from the beginning. It was chaotic, poorly managed, and Damon Wayans and Clayne Crawford did not get along. An hour before the second season finale aired in 2018, Crawford was fired and subsequently replaced by Sean William Scott in the third season. And then it was cancelled after three seasons.
There was a lot of drama surrounding Crawford’s termination, and I seem to recall that Deadline was provided near daily headlines (and we got in on it, too). From what I recall, Wayans was impossible to work with, insisted that his stunt double take on a lot of his coverage, and he missed a few days of production. But what ultimately came out of it was mostly that Crawford was hot-tempered, that he screamed at an Assistant Director (and was caught on camera doing so), a stunt went wrong a Wayans suffered a minor injury, and that Crawford at one point had blown up at Wayans.
Anyway, during the course of my research, I stumbled upon a video podcast from eight years ago where Clayne Crawford told his side of the story to Ross Patterson on the Drinkin Bros Podcast. I hit play, and honestly, I was transfixed by the hour, even though all of this news was eight years old, mostly because I was completely obsessed with Crawford from his Rectify days, and I was kind of bummed that the Lethal Weapon mishegoss derailed his career. Yes, he’s like the sixth lead on Chad Powers, and he recently starred in the second season of The Agency, but he mostly drowned in straight-to-digital type movies between 2018 and this year.
I’m not going to recount the entire conversation, but here’s the gist, based on Crawford’s lengthy account: Wayans was a nightmare to work with, mostly because he absolutely did not want to be there. He’d come out of retirement, he’d pitched a different show to Fox, they offered him Lethal Weapon instead, he never thought it would get off the ground, and when it ultimately landed, it’s the last thing he wanted to do. It sounds like it was a bad situation for him, that he had a terrible attitude about it, and he made life hell for most of the people involved. He and Crawford absolutely did not get along, but that ironically made the show somehow better because the Riggs and Murtaugh characters didn’t get along particularly well, either (but also had decent chemistry). But Wayans was the name on the marquee, so when it came time for one of them to go, Crawford was pushed out (he found out on Twitter, and even three months later on this podcast, he says that no one ever actually called to fire him).
As for Crawford and his bad behavior? He doesn’t exactly deny it, but he does spend much of the podcast rationalizing it, excusing it, or blaming it on the messy production. He basically says that after he blew up at the Assistant Director, they used video of it to blackmail him into giving in to Wayans’ demands. He also cops to blowing up at Wayans on set — calling him a p***y — but insists that it only happened after several days of Wayans skipping work or acting like a diva.
But here’s the thing: Crawford does not come off particularly well, either, even in his own generous retelling. Honestly, he’s kind of a dick. He’s from Alabama, and complains a lot that Hollywood has no work ethic, that these Hollywood people are fragile, and that he has little respect for network television (he also says that he almost walked after the first season, but they misled him into believing that Wayans would have a better attitude).
He takes a lot of credit for the success of the show (he says he rewrote a lot of the scripts), made a lot of changes to the character, but that doing so created a lot of friction between himself and the showrunner, Matt Miller. Mostly, though: He just didn’t play the game, and he’d be the first to admit it. He’s not a particularly diplmoatic person, and I suspect that you need to be. “I don’t make a show for executives. I don’t do f***king anything for producers. Those guys are bean counters.”
True. Sure. But also, unless you’re just really famous — and Clayne Crawford never was — you have to stay within the lines, no matter how talented you might be. And Crawford is talented.
But it has been eight years He’s had roles on two fairly well-known series this year. Maybe that whole experience finally humbled him, maybe he’s put the ego aside, and maybe he’s playing the game. I hope so. I’d like to see more of him on my television, but I hope he’s figured out how to get along better with his fellow cast members, even if they are themselves jackasses.
