Outside of Nucky Thompson, the most important player on the Boardwalk Empire chessboard was probably Jimmy Darmody. As the secondary leading man of the series, his murder was probably the most unexpected thing to ever come out of the HBO show. Even after his death, his presence haunted the series and set off a violent domino effect that influenced the direction of every season to follow. The son of Atlantic City political boss Commodore Louis Kaestner and damaged showgirl Gillian Darmody -- who had him when she was just 13 -- Jimmy Darmody was Nucky's surrogate son who struggled to immerse himself in the criminal underworld after surviving the horrors of WWI.
Jimmy was killed by Nucky at the end of Season 2 after leading the rebellion against him. Shot down in a dramatic scene that pinpoints the beginning of the end for Nucky's criminal empire. Despite the shock of killing one of the main characters so early on, the death fit organically into the series, even though it was apparently meant to happen much later.
For the two seasons that he was in, Jimmy Darmody was played by actor Michael Pitt, an up-and-coming talent in the early 2000s who gained an infamous reputation on the many sets he worked on. Despite being extremely talented, Pitt was an apparent hot head that was difficult to work with. Just a few months before his death on the show, Pitt was reportedly fired by his talent agent.
There were rumors that this is what killed the character off; however, executive producer Terrence Winter has repeatedly denied this, claiming that the decision to speed up Jimmy's death was made specifically from a storytelling standpoint and that Pitt was in on the death from the very beginning. He even requested to go out "in the worst way possible."
“[It’s] absolutely not true,” Winter told EW in an interview from 2011. “Michael is a total professional. He’s intense, of course, but I don’t think you can do that job without being intense.” Winter said the decision to kill off Jimmy was made at the very beginning of the second season. "The idea was to try and push things to their absolute limit, even if it makes it difficult for yourself and your writing team. If you take things to their logical extreme with the situation we created, Jimmy has betrayed Nucky, he tried to have him killed. You want to be honest about the storytelling… Anything short of Nucky [killing Jimmy] wouldn’t feel real, it wouldn’t be real. And it would be a cheat for us to say, ‘We want to keep our beloved character Jimmy Darmody alive."'
Another reason behind the early death was Dabney Coleman's battle with cancer. Coleman played Jimmy's father, but his storyline had to be altered to accommodate his worsening condition, which would occasionally cripple his ability to speak. Since Jimmy's actions were often tied directly to his father's role in the series, the fact that Coleman's scenes had to be reduced changed Jimmy's overall role in the story.
Things that would have normally developed over the course of multiple seasons were sped up to fit in several episodes as Jimmy murdered his father and attempted to take over, effectively ruining any chances for him and Nucky to reconcile. Since this was sped up, so was the ending to his story, which was always going to end in death.
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