Falling for a co-star is basically a rite of passage if you're an actor in a teen drama. Just look at Blake Lively and Penn Badgley from Gossip Girl, Joshua Jackson and Katie Holmes from Dawson's Creek, Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray from One Tree Hill, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith from Glee — the list goes on and on and on. And, according to The O.C.'s Mischa Barton, it's even longer than we thought.
The O.C. famously had one love affair play out both onscreen and off between Barton's co-stars Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson, who portrayed comic-book geek Seth Cohen and the spoiled-but-sweet popular girl Summer Roberts. The actors dated while filming the show from 2003 to 2006.
But Mischa, who played Marissa Cooper in the show, dropped a bombshell about her own on-set romance 20 years after we first fell in love with The O.C, as she revealed that she secretly dated her onscreen love interest Ben McKenzie in real life. Barton said in a February 21 episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast:
It wasn't just onscreen. That was my first—I had no idea what I was doing...I think that kind of set things off on the wrong foot, too, because we threw ourselves all into it very fast and then you know when you break up, and things don't work and they see you dating different people—notoriously there was a lot of inter-dating on that show—it was definitely tricky that it happened like right out of the gate.
McKenzie portrayed the quintessential bad boy Ryan Atwood in the teen drama. He had an on-and-off relationship with Barton's Marissa Cooper throughout the first three seasons of the show until her character was shockingly killed off in a car crash.
The now 38-year-old actress has been candid about her experiences as a teen idol while filming the show, and she shares in the podcast interview how the age gap between her and her The O.C. castmates, including McKenzie, made things "complicated" for her.
At the time of the first season, Barton was 17 years old and the only actual teen appearing on the teen show, where the other young actors were all in their twenties.
[Show staff] were like, you know, 'Mischa's disappeared with Ben and she's only 17 and a half, 18, and the producers went to my parents. It was kind of a whole ordeal. And that's in the very beginning of the show before we're even like halfway through a season. There was a lot going on there, that show. Just so much happened.
The former child actress confessed that her youth made her feel pressure to "grow up quickly" on set, despite the fact that she had been "a really late bloomer in school":
It was kind of complicated for me because I went into that like a virgin, like a kid, really feeling like I needed to grow up quickly to feel like I could portray acting with people older than me...It was a bit like, 'Oh wow, they know what they're doing. There's gonna be relationships on this show, and you're gonna need to play that part. And I didn't feel really ready for that because I was always a really late bloomer in school, and I hadn't really dated. I just had no idea what I was doing, so I felt like I needed to catch up.
Barton also revealed that she was the one to break things off with Ben before Season 1 had even aired, much to the chagrin of the older actor:
It would be a very, very tricky thing to keep going on set. I just felt not mature enough. ... I think he was really angry with me to begin with, and I felt that from the producers as well that they were not happy about that.
Mischa Barton left The O.C. in 2006, telling E! News that the heavily publicized show "wasn't the most ideal environment for a young, sensitive girl."
Though things clearly didn't work out between Mischa and Ben, you can revisit the star-crossed romance between their characters, Marissa and Ryan, on The O.C. with a Max subscription.
