Within the season 3 finale of the primetime teen cleaning soap “The O.C.” — which aired on Could 18, 2006 — viewers had been completely shocked when Mischa Barton’s lead character, Marissa Cooper, died in a fiery automobile crash. Inside the narrative, Marissa’s ex-boyfriend Kevin Volchok (Cam Gigandet) runs her automobile off the highway whereas she’s driving along with her on-again, off-again love Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), and Marissa dies in Ryan’s arms as their automobile catches hearth behind them. Barton, who really spoiled the twist shortly earlier than the episode aired, stayed quiet about her causes for leaving the collection behind for fairly a while, however in an unique interview with E! Information in 2021, Barton lastly spoke up about why she walked away.
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“It’s kind of difficult,” Barton mentioned, answering a query about when conversations started about her departure. “It began fairly early on as a result of it had quite a bit to do with them including Rachel [Bilson, who played Marissa’s best friend Summer Roberts] in final minute as, after the primary season, a collection common and night out all people’s pay — and kind of normal bullying from a number of the males on set that form of felt actually s**tty,” she mentioned. “However, you realize, I additionally cherished the present and needed to construct up my very own partitions and methods of getting round, coping with that and the celebrity that was thrust particularly at me.” She added that when all of this added to the “quantity of invasion” she was experiencing in her private life on account of her elevated fame, she “felt very unprotected.” That is a greater than affordable rationalization for wanting to depart.
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Barton continued, making it clear that producers mentioned they did not have to kill Marissa:
“This has been mentioned earlier than, however they form of gave me an possibility. The producers had been like, ‘Properly, would you like your job and to sail off into the sundown and doubtlessly you’ll be able to come again sooner or later in some weird TV state of affairs or we are able to kill your character off and you’ll go on together with your profession that you really want and what you wish to do?’ I used to be getting gives from large movies on the time and having to show them down. I had all the time been supporting in ‘The Sixth Sense’ and any of these issues. My dream was to be supplied these lead roles, so that is what occurred. It simply felt prefer it was the perfect factor for me and my well being and simply by way of probably not feeling protected by my forged and crew at that time.”
Mischa Barton needs her exit from The O.C. may have been dealt with in a greater means
In response to Mischa Barton, issues began to return aside on the seams through the present’s second season. “So midway via season 2 I might say, after we began doubling up on episodes and capturing [became] a lot more durable, and once more a number of that was an excessive amount of for me,” Barton mentioned, which is an efficient level; “The O.C.” ran for nicely over 20 episodes per season. “I did not know the place the character was going. I look again on it fairly fondly, however there’s stuff I feel folks did incorrect, and the best way they dealt with it. So, I simply did not really feel I may hold going.”
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Nonetheless, Barton has been an actor for a very long time — as she talked about, she confirmed up in “The Sixth Sense” as a toddler — so she was additionally clear about the truth that she wasn’t afraid of exhausting work. “No one loves their job greater than me,” Barton clarified. “For me, performing is a ardour and one thing I genuinely love, and it was one thing that I tremendous take pleasure in, but in addition I can all the time see issues for what they’re within the enterprise.” Barton defined that she was raised with a powerful understanding of the trade and that her dad and mom had been nice about making her conscious of the doable trappings. “Truthfully, 15 years on [at the time], I do assume it is unhappy that there wasn’t a greater means that it may’ve been dealt with.”
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Not solely that, however Barton really offered a constructive outlook ultimately, and she or he’s proper: Marissa obtained an enormous, dramatic, over-the-top loss of life that’s, if nothing else, extraordinarily memorable. “However I additionally do actually love that she had this epic loss of life and that it ended like that as a result of it is memorable and it isn’t simply one other flash within the pan,” Barton mused. “Individuals nonetheless come as much as me to today they usually’re like, ‘I bear in mind the place I used to be when your character died!’ And so they’re nonetheless emotional about it, prefer it was actually me. I feel that that is cool that folks really took one thing away from it. There have been classes to be realized from Marissa, for higher or for worse.” In the end, “The O.C.” obtained canceled after season 4, so perhaps the lesson to be realized right here was “do not kill off a essential character.”
The inventive workforce behind The O.C. says they had been pressured to tug a giant ‘rankings stunt’ — so that they killed Marissa
Mischa Barton has made herself fairly clear with regard to her exit from “The O.C.,” however in 2023, the present’s creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage spoke to Vainness Honest for the collection’ twentieth anniversary and instructed a barely completely different story. As Savage put it, producers instructed the present’s inventive workforce that they wanted to do one thing enormous within the season 3 finale in order that season 4 may occur.
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“We had been beneath super strain to do one thing with that stage of drama,” Savage mentioned. “Killing a collection common got here down from the highest. If we wished a season 4, we would need to do one thing like that.”
In response to Schwartz, they really remorse killing her off as nicely. “Wanting again on it, we want we may have provide you with a distinct answer,” he admitted. “We did not see another path on the time, which is why we went down that highway. However clearly in hindsight, there have been a number of different methods we may have written the character off the present — and given Mischa the break that she wanted and wished — that also would’ve allowed for that character to return.” Not solely that, however Schwartz mentioned that the fan outcry was notably tough: “And after we noticed the response after Marissa died from that viewers, it didn’t really feel good. It didn’t really feel like that viewers had been served or revered in the best way that we all the time wished and aimed to. Instantly, we had remorse at that time.”
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10 years earlier than that, Schwartz instructed The Each day Beast — as he celebrated a decade of the present — that Barton’s exit was a posh matter. When he was requested why he killed Marissa, Schwartz mentioned:
“It is a difficult, multifaceted query. It had as a lot to do with creatively feeling like this was all the time within the playing cards for this character and she or he was an inherently tragic heroine, and a part of the Ryan/Marissa story was him attempting to avoid wasting her from a destiny that she could not be rescued from, and a part of it needed to do with strain from the community by way of rankings, and what we may do for the present’s fourth season. For lots of critics, that character was a supply of frustration. For lots of viewers members, that was their favourite character.”
To be truthful to Schwartz, Barton hadn’t spoken out about her exit but, so maybe he was attempting to be respectful; in any case, it certain would not look like everybody concerned with Marissa Cooper’s loss of life was on the identical web page apart from the truth that all of them want it had gone down in another way. Additionally, “The O.C.” obtained canceled after season 4, so there was no true completely happy ending right here.
“The O.C.” is streaming on Hulu now.
