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. Throughout the narrative, Marissa’s ex-boyfriend Kevin Volchok (Cam Gigandet) runs her automobile off the street whereas she’s driving together with her on-again, off-again love Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), and Marissa dies in Ryan’s arms as their automobile catches fireplace 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 sophisticated,” Barton mentioned, answering a query about when conversations started about her departure. “It began fairly early on as a result of it had lots 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 type of basic bullying from among the males on set that form of felt actually s**tty,” she mentioned. “However, you understand, I additionally beloved 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 cheap 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, ‘Effectively, would you like your job and to sail off into the sundown and probably you possibly can come again sooner or later in some weird TV situation or we are able to kill your character off and you’ll go on along with your profession that you really want and what you wish to do?’ I used to be getting affords from huge movies on the time and having to show them down. I had at all times 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 not likely feeling protected by my forged and crew at that time.”
Mischa Barton needs her exit from The O.C. might have been dealt with in a greater manner
In keeping with Mischa Barton, issues began to come back aside on the seams throughout the present’s second season. “So midway by way of season 2 I’d say, after we began doubling up on episodes and taking pictures [became] a lot more durable, and once more loads of that was an excessive amount of for me,” Barton mentioned, which is an effective level; “The O.C.” ran for effectively 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 believe folks did fallacious, and the way in which they dealt with it. So, I simply did not really feel I might 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 onerous work. “No person 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 additionally I can at all times see issues for what they’re within the enterprise.” Barton defined that she was raised with a robust understanding of the trade and that her mother and father had been nice about making her conscious of the attainable trappings. “Actually, 15 years on [at the time], I do assume it is unhappy that there wasn’t a greater manner that it might’ve been dealt with.”
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Not solely that, however Barton really supplied a constructive outlook in the long run, and she or he’s proper: Marissa received an enormous, dramatic, over-the-top demise that’s, if nothing else, extraordinarily memorable. “However I additionally do actually love that she had this epic demise and that it ended like that as a result of it is memorable and it is not simply one other flash within the pan,” Barton mused. “Individuals nonetheless come as much as me to at the present time and so they’re like, ‘I bear in mind the place I used to be when your character died!’ They usually’re nonetheless emotional about it, prefer it was actually me. I believe that that is cool that individuals really took one thing away from it. There have been classes to be realized from Marissa, for higher or for worse.” Finally, “The O.C.” received canceled after season 4, so perhaps the lesson to be realized right here was “do not kill off a foremost character.”
The artistic crew behind The O.C. says they had been pressured to drag an enormous ‘rankings stunt’ — in order 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 Self-importance Truthful for the collection’ twentieth anniversary and informed a barely totally different story. As Savage put it, producers informed the present’s artistic crew that they wanted to do one thing big within the season 3 finale in order that season 4 might occur.
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“We had been beneath great stress 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 might should do one thing like that.”
In keeping with Schwartz, they really remorse killing her off as effectively. “Trying again on it, we want we might have give you a unique resolution,” he admitted. “We did not see an alternate path on the time, which is why we went down that street. However clearly in hindsight, there have been numerous different methods we might 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 significantly 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 way in which that we at all times wished and aimed to. Instantly, we had remorse at that time.”
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10 years earlier than that, Schwartz informed The Every 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 sophisticated, multifaceted query. It had as a lot to do with creatively feeling like this was at all times 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 stress from the community by way of rankings, and what we might 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 positive does not look like everybody concerned with Marissa Cooper’s demise was on the identical web page apart from the truth that all of them want it had gone down in a different way. Additionally, “The O.C.” received canceled after season 4, so there was no true comfortable ending right here.
“The O.C.” is streaming on Hulu now.
