Within the season 3 finale of the primetime teen cleaning soap “The O.C.” — which aired on Might 18, 2006 — viewers have been completely shocked when Mischa Barton’s lead character, Marissa Cooper, died in a fiery automotive crash. Inside the narrative, Marissa’s ex-boyfriend Kevin Volchok (Cam Gigandet) runs her automotive off the street 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 automotive 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 mentioned, answering a query about when conversations started about her departure. “It began fairly early on as a result of it had loads 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 everyone’s pay — and form of common bullying from among the males on set that sort of felt actually s**tty,” she mentioned. “However, you already know, 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 cheap clarification for wanting to go away.
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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 sort of gave me an choice. The producers have been like, ‘Properly, would you like your job and to sail off into the sundown and doubtlessly you may come again sooner or later in some weird TV situation or we will kill your character off and you’ll go on together with your profession that you really want and what you need to do?’ I used to be getting provides 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 supplied 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 method
In accordance with Mischa Barton, issues began to return aside on the seams in the course of the present’s second season. “So midway by way of season 2 I might say, once we began doubling up on episodes and capturing [became] a lot tougher, and once more lots of that was an excessive amount of for me,” Barton mentioned, which is an effective 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 individuals did mistaken, and the best way they dealt with it. So, I simply did not really feel I might maintain 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 laborious 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 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 have been nice about making her conscious of the potential trappings. “Actually, 15 years on [at the time], I do suppose it is unhappy that there wasn’t a greater method that it might’ve been dealt with.”
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Not solely that, however Barton really offered a optimistic outlook in the long run, and she or he’s proper: Marissa bought 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 isn’t simply one other flash within the pan,” Barton mused. “Folks nonetheless come as much as me to this present day they usually’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 feel 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.” bought canceled after season 4, so perhaps the lesson to be realized right here was “do not kill off a foremost character.”
The artistic workforce behind The O.C. says they have been pressured to drag an enormous ‘scores 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 Vainness Truthful for the collection’ twentieth anniversary and informed a barely completely different story. As Savage put it, producers informed the present’s artistic 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 have been below 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 needed a season 4, we might need to do one thing like that.”
In accordance with Schwartz, they really remorse killing her off as nicely. “Trying again on it, we want we might have give you a distinct 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 a lot of 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 mentioned 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 best way that we all the time needed 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 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 save lots of 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 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 positive does not appear 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.” bought canceled after season 4, so there was no true blissful ending right here.
“The O.C.” is streaming on Hulu now.
