If you grew up in the early '00s, you know that absolutely everybody was talking about The O.C. along with the massive stars of the show.
One of those stars was Mischa Barton, who famously played Marissa Cooper for three seasons until she was shockingly killed off in the Season 3 finale.
In a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Mischa reflected on that period of her life and what it was really like going through such a heightened level of fame (becoming a household name almost instantly) starting at age 17 after previously launching her acting career as a child star. For Mischa, being that level of famous in the early '00s (one period of time where media and paparazzi were notoriously horrible to young female celebrities) was incredibly hard and it "was all very Hunger Games." She recalled being hounded by paparazzi — and even having her car tracked. "I was stalked. I did go a little bit nuts at [one] point. I just felt really helpless."
"You can go to therapy every day for the rest of your life," she said. "But there’s just a certain amount of trauma [from] all that I went through, particularly in my early 20s, that just doesn’t go away overnight."
Mischa also opened up about the way her body was scrutinized during the height of her fame. "Nothing I did was good enough," she said. "It was the peak of cruelty about young women's bodies. It was wild.”
And despite the struggles she went through, she sees that people now look back at that early '00s era and see a lot of the cruelty that young female celebrities had to endure. "You can see how sorry people feel for what they did to people like Britney [Spears] then," she said. "Everyone now is like, 'I can’t believe we did that to those poor women.'"
You can read Mischa's full interview with the Sunday Times in support of her return to TV on Neighbours here.
