We may be in for a very different season nine of American Horror Story. 

For the first time ever, Evan Peters is sitting the season out, or so he told a reporter at WonderCon over the weekend when he asked if Peters is involved in the new season.

“No, I’m going to sit a season out,” Peters says in a short clip posted on Twitter by a producer for Extra. 

It’s not much of a surprise that Peters is taking a break. The actor, who is appearing as Quicksilver in the upcoming Dark Phoenix movie, had opened up to GQ last year about feeling “exhausted” by sinister roles like the ones he plays in AHS. 

“It’s just exhausting. It’s really mentally draining, and you don’t want to go to those places ever in your life,” he told the magazine. “And so you have to go there for the scenes, and it ends up integrating it somehow into your life. You’re in traffic and you find yourself screaming and you’re like, What the hell? This isn’t who I am.” 

More recently, Peters talked to GQ Style about those quotes and that interview in general and what he was feeling when he said those things, and said he plans to “take a break.” 

“I think it was a full-on burnout,” he said. “I’m going to take a break, regroup, decompress, get back in touch with what I feel like I want to do. Not that I didn’t want to do any of those roles – they’re exactly what I wanted to do. It was just zero to 100 instantaneously. I want to play music.”

We are all for taking some mental health time to decompress, so if that’s what Peters is doing, we’ll happily take a season of American Horror Story without him. 

The only confirmed cast members for season nine are currently Gus Kenworthy and Emma Roberts, who recently split with Peters. They will be playing boyfriend and girlfriend. Until now, it had been assumed that Peters and Sarah Paulson would also be a part of the cast. 

No theme has been hinted at as of yet, but as of FX’s TV Critics Association press day in February, Ryan Murphy had at least shared his idea for the season with the network, so that’s something! 

E! News has reached out to FX for comment. 

American Horror Story airs on FX.