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 is a bit difficult,” Barton stated, 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 performed Marissa’s greatest good friend Summer season Roberts) in final minute as, after the primary season, a collection common and night out everyone’s pay — and kind of common bullying from a number of the males on set that sort of felt actually s**tty,” she stated. “However, , 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 because of her elevated fame, she “felt very unprotected.” That is a greater than cheap clarification for wanting to depart.
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Barton continued, making it clear that producers stated they did not have to kill Marissa:
“This has been stated earlier than, however they sort of gave me an possibility. The producers had been like, ‘Nicely, 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 situation or we will kill your character off and you may go on together with your profession that you really want and what you wish to do?’ I used to be getting gives from massive 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 provided these lead roles, so that is what occurred. It simply felt prefer it was the most effective 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. might have been dealt with in a greater manner
In line with Mischa Barton, issues began to come back aside on the seams through the present’s second season. “So midway by season 2 I might say, once we began doubling up on episodes and taking pictures (grew to become) a lot tougher, and once more a variety of that was an excessive amount of for me,” Barton stated, which is an effective level; “The O.C.” ran for properly 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 baby — so she was additionally clear about the truth that she wasn’t afraid of laborious 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 get pleasure from, 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 mother and father had been nice about making her conscious of the doable trappings. “Actually, 15 years on (on the time), I do suppose 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 ultimately, and he or she’s proper: Marissa acquired 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 keep 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 discovered from Marissa, for higher or for worse.” Finally, “The O.C.” acquired canceled after season 4, so possibly the lesson to be discovered right here was “do not kill off a important character.”
The inventive workforce behind The O.C. says they had been pressured to tug an enormous ‘scores 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 Self-importance Truthful for the collection’ twentieth anniversary and informed a barely totally different story. As Savage put it, producers informed the present’s inventive workforce that they wanted to do one thing large within the season 3 finale in order that season 4 might occur.
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“We had been below great stress to do one thing with that degree of drama,” Savage stated. “Killing a collection common got here down from the highest. If we needed a season 4, we might should do one thing like that.”
In line with Schwartz, they really remorse killing her off as properly. “Trying again on it, we want we might have provide you with a unique resolution,” 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 numerous different methods we might have written the character off the present — and given Mischa the break that she wanted and needed — that also would’ve allowed for that character to return.” Not solely that, however Schwartz stated that the fan outcry was significantly tough: “And once 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 all the time needed and aimed to. Instantly, we had remorse at that time.”
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10 years earlier than thatSchwartz 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 stated:
“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 he or she was an inherently tragic heroine, and a part of the Ryan/Marissa story was him attempting to save lots of 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 scores, 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 honest 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 seem to be 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.” acquired canceled after season 4, so there was no true completely happy ending right here.
“The O.C.” is streaming on Hulu now.
