Most recently, that is, until late July 2026, when official confirmation came that two more cast members are leaving the show, closing their arcs early into the series’ 15th season: Joe Miñoso, whose character, Joe Cruz, has been with the series from its early days; and Dermot Mulroney, who entered the series in Season 13 as Chief Dom Pascal, following the exit of another beloved character, Chief Boden (Eamonn Walker). These aren’t inconsequential characters leaving, either, but two major players in Chicago Fire lore, opening the door for yet more high-profile casting changes. But there’s a catch: they may not be the only two.
‘Chicago Fire’s Loss Might Be for the Best
As for why Miñoso and Mulroney, and their characters in turn, are leaving wasn’t disclosed in the official announcements. But in the case of the latter, Pascal’s storyline had all but wrapped up in Season 14, and depending on the selection Severide (Taylor Kinney) makes between becoming the new Firehouse 51 Chief or Chief of Fire Investigation, left furiously unknown in the Season 14 finale (which may play into Cruz’s exit as well — more on that further down), that door may be closed outright. Mulroney’s appearance as a regular on Netflix‘s The Hunting Wiveslikely factors in as well, although a third season of the popular series hasn’t been confirmed as yet.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
However, Chicago Fire losing these two characters might be for the best, despite the disappointment in seeing them go. The One Chicago franchise, as a whole, was hit with budget cuts in 2025, effectively reducing how much screen time certain series regulars were given. As a result, characters like Kidd (Miranda Rae Mayo), Herrmann (David Eigenberg), and Mouch (Christian Stolte) weren’t in Season 14’s “Broken Things,” Severide didn’t appear in “Coming in Hot,” and so on. With the series losing two cast members heading into the season, that should, at least in theory, ease the pressure off and allow for storylines to use all its cast in every episode, a far better alternative than what happened in “Hit and Run,” where Violet (Hanako Greensmith), LIzzy (Jocelyn Hudon) and Vasquez (Brandon Larracuente) simply didn’t show up, no explanations given.
There Could Be Another Empty Spot in Firehouse 51 in ‘Chicago Fire’
Of course, shortly after the news dropped about Miñoso and Mulroney, Deadline reported that Da’Vinchi had been cast as a firefighter recruit named Marcus Burke, seemingly throwing a wrench into the theory presented above. Ah, but as alluded to before, there’s a catch, and it has to do with the events that played out in the Season 14 finale, “Thank You.” As the episode neared its conclusion, an explosion caught the bulk of Firehouse 51 off-guard, lighting up firefighters scurrying back down the ladder and trapping others in the basement of the building.
The episode practically confirms that at least one of three characters is either seriously injured or killed, with the camera cutting to the unsuspecting wives of the three in question: Mouch’s wife Trudy (Amy Morton); Cruz’s wife Chloe (Kristen Gutoskie); and Herrmann’s wife Cindy (Robyn Coffin). And of the three, a case can be built (and has been) that Herrmann doesn’t survive. That means there could be three characters making their exit in Season 15, still leaving two spots open if Burke sticks around. The only thing we know for certain is that Chicago Fire will soon be Cruz and Pascal-free. The rest is up to showrunner Victor Teran, who assumes the position after another Season 14 exit in April, which saw Andrea Newman leave the show. Newman had been with the series from the start and spent the last few years as showrunner.
