Mischa Barton’s ‘O.C.’ Bombshell: She Dated Ben McKenzie IRL
Just a few months after an oral history of The O.C. was published that purported to spill all the behind-the-scenes gossip from the beloved teen drama, Mischa Barton has just dropped one of the biggest bombshells of all.
On Wednesday, Barton, who played The O.C.’s chronically troubled beauty Marissa Cooper, admitted for the first time that she dated her co-star and on-screen romantic partner Ben McKenzie.
“It wasn’t just on-screen either,” she revealed on the Call Her Daddy podcast. “It was kind of complicated for me because I went into that like a virgin, a kid, really feeling like I needed to grow up quickly.”
As Barton told Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper, her whirlwind romance with McKenzie was “complicated” because she was just 17 at the time, while he was 25. Barton told Cooper that some of the show’s producers even went to her parents after she “disappeared with Ben” on set. “It was kind of a whole ordeal,” she remembered.
Her relationship with McKenzie, who played Orange County outsider Ryan Atwood, was Barton’s “first,” she said.
“I had no idea about relationships at all or sex, so it was kind of just a whole learning curve for me,” she said. “…And I had no idea what I was doing. I think that kind of set things off on the wrong foot, too, because it was like—you know, people hook up on these shows and whatever, these things happen. But we threw ourselves all into it very fast.”
The age gap with the rest of her co-stars was also “a bit tricky for everyone,” she added. “I was experiencing all my firsts and I was so young and my mom would be on set and I just needed a lot more attention in that sense. ... It was a lot of my firsts, let’s put it like that. And that kind of really separated me, a little bit, from them, in the sense that I wasn’t out there living on my own in L.A. yet.”
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Once she and McKenzie broke things off, things got dicey on set, she said.
“I think he was really angry with me to begin with, and I felt the punishment of that,” she said. “I felt that from the producers as well, that they were not happy about that. But there was such great chemistry between the characters, and I think people did fall in love with them because there was genuine friendship and love there on some level.”
“That sexual tension was there, it reads,” she added. “Even when you’re looking at the scenes on the ferris wheel and stuff, I think we kind of hated each other at that point, but there was still this intense kind of tension there, and so it really worked for the show.”
The O.C. ran for four seasons from 2003 to 2007, with Barton exiting in May 2006, when Marissa was—spoiler alert!—shockingly killed off the show. During their time on the series, and even in the years that followed, Barton and McKenzie repeatedly denied any rumors of an off-screen romance, à la their co-stars Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson, who dated for three years while filming the show. Now, at long last, we know the truth.
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