Mischa Barton Finally Confirmed She Dated This O.C. Co-Star
This is tea.
Mischa Barton finally set the record straight on what exactly went down behind the scenes on The O.C. During a Feb. 21 episode of Call Her Daddy, the actor (who played Marissa Cooper) admitted to dating her co-star Ben McKenzie (who played Ryan Atwood) while the show was filming.
Barton and McKenzie played each other’s love interests on the show, which aired from 2003 to 2007. But Barton told host Alex Cooper that the romance “wasn’t just onscreen.” Apparently, the duo started dating as the show began, when Barton was 17 and McKenzie was 25.
"[Show staff] were like, 'Mischa's disappeared with Ben and she's only 17-and-a-half, 18.' The producers went to my parents. It was kind of a whole ordeal," she told Cooper, per E!. “That [was] in the very beginning of the show, before we’re even halfway through a season.”
Looking back, Barton seemed to regret how it unfolded. “I think that kind of set things off on the wrong foot,” she said. “People hook up on these shows and these things happen, but we threw ourselves all into it very fast.” (Reminder: Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson, who also played each other’s love interests on the show, dated IRL, too.)
The 38-year-old continued, “I didn’t feel really ready for that. I was always a really late bloomer in school, and I hadn’t really dated. I just had no idea what I was doing really. So, I felt like I needed to catch up.”
“I went into that [show] a virgin, a kid,” Barton told Cooper. “I had no idea about relationships at all, or sex, and so it was like kind of a whole learning curve for me.”
It became awkward when things ended between Barton and McKenzie before Season 1 had wrapped — in fact, they split before their characters Marissa and Ryan ever kissed, and Barton confessed she and McKenzie “hated each other at that point.”
"I think he was really angry with me, to begin with, and I felt the punishment of that. I felt that from the producers as well, that they were not happy about that," Barton explained. "We had to just suck it up and get on with it but there was a lot of jabs behind the scenes and off-camera."
