14 DAY TRIAL // Mischa Barton saw her career explode when she starred on “The O.C.,” the TV show that, incidentally, is also her biggest hit to date, but she would never relive the experience if she had the possibility to go back in time and choose to do it again.
One would think that she’d be grateful for the exposure and the money the show earned her, but Mischa says she came to regret it: because of what happened afterwards and how celebrity ruined her personal life, she found out that it wasn’t worth it.
In 2007, back in the day when she was still an A-list celebrity, Mischa was famously arrested for DUI and this turned out to be just the first incident in a very long series that culminated with her 2009 hospitalization and involuntary hold (for mental evaluation), which she later admitted was a full-blown meltdown.
She seems to equate her role on “The O.C.” to the root of all her problems, because it exposed her to a slice of life she would not have known otherwise.
“It's something I came so close to not doing. I had a really great thing with film. People say be grateful for what you have but it certainly was not the kind of thing I was expecting it to be. I've kind of seen it all,” Mischa says, as cited by Us Weekly.
Whilst working on the show, she was “depressed and overworked” and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she also had to cope with excessive attention from the media.
“It's tough. It's really tough when you are young in this business. It's just one of those things when you are growing under a microscope and changing and that evolution is human. That humanity aspect means flaws – which people don't want to see,” she says.
Mischa is aware of the bad press around her personal life and how much it damaged her career as well. So clearly, if she had a choice, she would not do the show again or, if she did, she’d work harder to keep her private life private.
This is also her advice to other young actresses out there, if they want to make it for longer than 15 minutes: don’t play the celebrity game, don’t believe your own hype, and play your cards close to your chest, don’t let others know too much about you.
Granted, she sounds ungrateful for the opportunity she got with “The O.C.,” but if you look past it, she does have a point, doesn’t she?