When news broke in August that American Crime Story: Katrina would undergo a major “creative pivot,” ditching its initial planned story to zero in on New Orleans’s Memorial Medical Center and its Dr. Anna Pou (who will be portrayed by Ryan Murphy repertory player Sarah Paulson), outlets from The Hollywood Reporter to Deadline wistfully hoped that Murphy might also find a way to weave in the series’s previously announced stars, including Dennis Quaid as President George W. Bush, Matthew Broderick as FEMA Director Michael D. Brown, and Annette Bening as former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco.

But in the case of Bening, at least, those wishes will never get off the ground. The multiple-Oscar nominee says that she and her Governor Blanco have been written out of the series.

“What happened was, from what I understand, Ryan Murphy—who I’ve worked with before—decided he needed to stop and rethink the way he was approaching Katrina,” Bening told Vanity Fair at the 31st annual Museum of the Moving Image Salute on Dec. 13, where she was being honored for her body of work. “He found that the best way to do it was to basically use one of the—there were a couple of major books written about Katrina that were completely brilliant and thorough and thoughtful, and one of them is called Five Days at Memorial. So I think he decided that he would just focus on the story by telling it that way. Kathleen Blanco really isn’t in that.”

Five Days at Memorial, by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, tells the true story of Dr. Pou and her colleagues and patients, who were stranded in New Orleans’s Memorial Medical Center in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Left without power and proper medical resources, Dr. Pou and two I.C.U. nurses resorted to euthanizing multiple terminally ill patients by overdosing them with morphine. The three Memorial employees were later charged with second-degree murder. Adapting Fink’s 2013 book for the small screen marked a major shake-up for American Crime Story: Katrina, which was originally slated to be an adaptation of The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley.

Bening is aware of reports indicating that roles may or may not be written for herself, Broderick, and Quaid in the season’s new iteration. Her response? “Yeah, I don’t think so. Which is O.K.”