Colton Haynes almost wasn't cast on Teen Wolf — all because of a photo shoot he did as a teenager.
In his new memoir, Miss Memory Lane, the openly-gay actor revealed that early in his career he was pressured to conceal his sexuality.
"It didn’t matter who was on my team, the message I got was always the same: ‘You will not work if you are yourself,'" Colton reportedly wrote.
In fact, Colton says he was close to losing his role on Teen Wolf when MTV discovered he had done a photo shoot for gay magazine XY as a teenager.
Despite the fact that Colton's team had tried to wipe the shirtless photos from the internet, including years of "sending cease-and-desist letters," the head of the network still wasn't pleased.
Colton explained that his manager told him that the "head of MTV almost didn’t hire" him "because of that XY photo shoot" and that Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis had to fight for him.
"Jeff was the creator of Teen Wolf, and he had indeed fought for me; I was grateful to him, and eager not to fuck up the opportunity," Colton wrote.
And while Colton spent a long time trying to separate himself from the XY photo shoot, it wasn't until last year that he finally decided not to hide it any longer.
Colton shared one of the photos on Instagram, writing that it had previously made him "incredibly ashamed."
"It made me sad to see these pictures I had taken as a teenage model...before I learned to see my queerness as a liability," Colton wrote, adding, "I was jealous of him. The boy in these pictures was so open, so free. He had to be taught that it wasn’t ok to be who he was."
