Patrick J. Adams on ‘Suits’ Exit: “I Was Miserable and Drinking Too Much”

Patrick J. Adams says his relationship with alcohol impacted his final season on Suits.

The former star of the hit USA series says he was struggling with depression and drinking too much during the seventh season, when his character Mike Ross was written out of the show with a concluded story.

“I wasn’t taking good care of my mental health and I was drinking too much [at] the end of season seven,” Adams told Jesse Tyler Ferguson on Tuesday’s episode of the Dinner’s On Me podcast. “I was in a zone of living a pretty unexamined life. Pretty miserable [and] I would say, pretty depressed. I didn’t have the tools to deal with that depression beyond just spending money and drinking too much, and not really knowing how to talk about it.

“I would numb myself [to] deal with my insecurity and my fears,” he added. “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.’ The best thing I think I ever did for myself was stop stop drinking. It just needed to happen in order for all these other things to happen.”

He continyed, “The only reason to stay was … money. I didn’t know what else to offer. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think about the money [Suits star Gabriel Macht] made those last two years, but I never regretted the decision for a second. It was the right thing for my marriage … it was time.”

Adams is hosting his own podcast along with his former costar Sarah Rafferty, Sidebar: A Suits Rewatch, which is currently in the middle of Adams’ final season. The former USA Network show racked up 57.7 billion total minutes on Netflix when it experienced a resurgence last year, which spawned the forthcoming spinoff series Suits: LA that will see Macht reprising his role. Adams, meanwhile, will next star in the upcoming BBC/Netflix limited series Lockerbie and the highly anticipated Yellowstone sequel series The Madison.

Adams previously told The Hollywood Reporter that Suits‘ renewed popularity was a bit difficult to process, at least initially.

“At first, I had, if I’m really honest, I had a sort of, ‘Well, what is this going to do for me?’ kind of attitude, which happens sometimes,” he said of the show finding a second life on Netflix. “You’re like, ‘Okay, this is great, but Suits is in the past. How is this going to affect my career now? I can’t work, I can’t audition and I can’t really talk about it.’ … And then it just kept getting more and more popular. What kept creeping up, for me, was this sense that it won’t be ignored anymore … I didn’t watch it at all [at the time], because I was so self-conscious and insecure the whole time, so I’m just going to let that be in the past. There was some denial in that process of not facing it, of just wanting it to be in the rearview. The best days of my life were on that show, and then, as anything over the course of the better part of a decade, there were some really hard days — and I didn’t want to think about any of it.”

Looking back at his performance today, Adams says, “Now, I am filled with so much compassion for myself … [I’m able] to be kinder to myself and realize how amazing this entire group of people were. When you’re in something, you don’t have time to really be in any kind of gratitude, to just sit there and go, ‘How cool is this?’ Or, at least, I didn’t as a young person, because I was so determined to get it right, do well and make the most out of it. It’s a hard thing to do when you’re stressed and there’s a lot of pressure. Watching the show now, I get to sit in that gratitude. I get to really realize how special this show was.”