Jason Alexander on why he threatened to quit Seinfeld

While Seinfeld may have been a roaring success, actor Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza, has revealed he once threatened to quit Seinfeld.

The actor was working on the second season of the hit comedy when he became frustrated by the storyline of an episode and told co-creator Larry David that he might leave the show. 

"Very early on Larry wrote an episode where Elaine and Jerry go to Florida and Kramer and George are not in that episode," Alexander said to Access Hollywood.

"And when Seinfeld started I had a very successful career in the theatre in New York which is what I thought I was going to be doing all my life.

"So when I was written out of an episode I came back the next week and I said to Larry, 'Look, I get it. But if you do that again, do it permanently. If you don't need me to be here every week ... I'd just as soon go back home and do what I was doing'."

But thankfully, Larry David didn't let Alexander leave. 

"He freaked out," Alexander said of David's reaction, "and then he did it and thank god he didn't say, 'take a hike'".

While Seinfeld is now considered as one of the greatest TV comedies, the stars of the show didn't actually realise they had a hit show until season four. 

"The Contest [an episode where the four main characters bet to see who can go the longest without pleasuring themselves] ... I think that was the marker where we went, 'I think we have some job security for a while'", he said.