These are their stories: Sam Waterston to leave ‘Law & Order’ after 400 episodes

NEW YORK — Sam Waterston, who played the spiky, no-nonsense district attorney in “Law & Order” since the mid-1990s, is resigning from his legal position.

Waterston’s final Jack McCoy episode will be Feb. 22, NBC said Friday. He has appeared in more than 400 episodes of the police drama, earning a SAG Award and Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for the role.

“The time has come to move on and take Jack McCoy with me,” Waterston said in a statement. “It’s sad to leave, but I’m too curious about what’s next. An actor doesn’t want to get too comfortable.”

Tony Goldwyn, who starred in “Scandal” and the 1990 film “Ghost,” has been chosen as the new district attorney.

McCoy and prosecutors would take up the legal case once New York City detectives finished investigating a crime that represents, as the narrator says, “two separate but equally important groups.”

McCoy was a brilliant and tough angel of justice, prone to fits of moral indignation and cutting straight to the truth. “Your pain for him might seem a little more real if he hadn’t admitted that he cut off his wife’s head,” he once told a defendant.

The bushy-browed Waterston began his career as a stage actor in New York with several Shakespearean roles, including Lear, Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes, Prospero, Leonato, Prince Hal, Silvius, Cloten and Benedict.

That led to Waterston playing Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby” opposite Robert Redford, and the role of Tom Wingfield in a television production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” starring Katharine Hepburn, for which he earned his first Emmy nomination.

Waterston, 83, joined “Law & Order” in the fourth season in 1994 and remained until the show stopped in 2010, returning for the reboot in 2022.