The O.C.: where are the stars of the beloved ’00s television show now?
Mischa Barton, Adam Brody, Rachel Bilson … What are your Newport faves up to at this moment?
“Welcome to the OC, b**ch.”
Five little words to sum up the mood of one brooding, brawling teen soap opera, five little words to cement a television series in history forever.
The O.C., created by Josh Schwartz and premiering in 2003 before eventually running for four blistering seasons, encapsulated the height of ’00s culture.
The show had everything: lifestyles of the rich and the famous, a hit-making cooler-than-thou indie soundtrack, a quartet of newcomers in the star-is-born roles of a lifetime and more California cool girl characters with tiny Chanel handbags than the pages of Us Weekly.
The O.C. was a teen show writ large, a sprawling Shakespearean tale of tragedy and romance, with a few hints of comedy thrown in for good measure.
And, for a little while, the stars who made it great dominated the headlines.
Mischa Barton, Ben McKenzie, Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson were on the cover of every magazine. (Teen Vogue for Brody and Bilson; Tatler, Nylon and Vogue for Barton.)
But where are they now? What are Orange County’s best and brightest up to these days?
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MISCHA BARTON
When The O.C. premiered, Barton emerged as the series’ breakaway star. As the troubled Marissa Cooper, whose popularity belied a broken relationship with her mother and attempts to rebel against the life she had been brought up in, Barton was the star of the show.
Off the back of The O.C.’s runaway success, she booked advertising deals, brand endorsements, magazine covers and plum roles in the remake of St Trinians. When she left the show in 2006 in the season three finale, it felt like she was like the wise guest who knows to leave before the party turns sour. She had the world at her feet.
At the time, Barton ran in a pretty fast crowd that included Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. On the surface, the life of a champagne bubble about town “It” girl, full of vodka cranberries and Chloe Paddington bags, was good. But privately, each of these women faced their own demons, and Barton was no exception.
Immediately after leaving The O.C., things started to unravel for Barton. By 2007 she was a near-permanent tabloid fixture, making headlines for being hospitalised after a barbecue at Nicole Richie’s house and was arrested for drunk driving.
In 2009, Barton was admitted to a psychiatric ward in the middle of filming a comeback role in Ashton Kutcher’s television series The Beautiful Life.
After that, Barton mostly retreated from the public eye, taking on a few small television roles in Law & Order: SVU and appearing on the reality series Dancing With The Stars. But in 2017, Barton was hospitalised again after a neighbour called 911 to report her for “erratic behaviour”. In shocking footage captured on camera, the star was seen dishevelled, ranting and raving in her backyard.
“It’s not the kind of thing you want to go over again and again explaining because life is complicated and so many weird things lead to an incident like that happening,” Barton told The New York Times, in reference to her most recent hospitalisation. “It is not cut and dry. All I can say is it was a huge wake-up call about a lot of things.”
More recently, Barton took on a role as herself in the remake of the popular MTV reality series The Hills, which was commissioned in the ’00s off the back of the original success of The O.C.
Barton’s casting was, according to producers, a knowing wink to the role she played in popularising a particular breed of California cool girl.
“She’s been out of the spotlight for some time, and she knows there’s a lot of curiosity about her and her story,” Nina Diaz, president of entertainment at MTV told The New York Times. “She’s a great example of a new beginning.”
Barton only lasted one season, though. In March 2020, she was cut from the second season for being “too bland”, according to TMZ.
Aside from acting, Barton had been in the court system battling a revenge porn case against two of her ex boyfriends, seeking to prevent the distribution of explicit material and to be granted a restraining order against them.
In 2018, Barton won her case, which had dominated her life for a year. “It’s not a joke when you end up having to go to court and fight for those things,” Barton told The New York Times. “It’s not really possible to keep everything else going at once.”
BEN MCKENZIE
McKenzie was a starry-eyed 23-year-old when he moved to Los Angeles seeking the bright lights of Hollywood.
Originally from Austin, Texas, he had lived in New York for a few years before trying his luck in California, where he struck gold in the role of Ryan Atwood in The O.C. The misunderstood “bad boy” from Chino (ew), Ryan was rescued by Sandy Cohen from his early brush with the law to become part of the Cohen family.
From the start, he was established as having a powerful connection with Marissa, which would dominate both of their character arcs over the seasons.
McKenzie starred in all four seasons of The O.C., a performance that earned him a gaggle of nominations (and wins) at the Teen Choice awards. While making The O.C., he starred in Junebug alongside Amy Adams.
After The O.C., his major roles were in cop drama Southland and, in 2014, as a young James Gordon in Gotham, a series set in the world of Batman and Robin.
Like The O.C., Gotham has meant a lot to McKenzie. The series has allowed him to stretch his creative wings: he has both directed and written episodes for the series. He also connected with his now wife Morena Baccarin, the star of Deadpool and Spy, on the set of the show.
In 2016, they announced the birth of their daughter and in 2017 they were married in New York.
In fact, the pair had met earlier during the heyday of The O.C., when Baccarin guest-starred in three episodes as the daughter of Sandy Cohen’s boss. “I apparently blew her off,” McKenzie has said in an interview.
“So I‘m thinking, ’What kind of idiot would blow off this gorgeous, beautiful, sophisticated, intelligent, successful woman?’ Then I thought of what kind of boy I was at 25, and (I was) that kind of idiot.”
RACHEL BILSON
Born into a Hollywood family – her mother was a sex therapist, her father a writer and director – Bilson got the acting bug early. She attended a Los Angeles high school where her peers included Kirsten Dunst, Rami Malek and Katharine McPhee and had her onscreen debut in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer in 2003.
Months later, she was cast as Summer in The O.C., best friend to Marissa and the initially aloof love interest to the nerdy Seth Cohen (Adam Brody).
Film roles followed, including the starring turn as a college student who falls in love with an older man in Zach Braff’s 2006 film The Last Kiss. In 2007, she made Jumper, a time-travelling action film alongside Star Wars’ Hayden Christensen.
The pair were in a relationship for 10 years, and welcomed a daughter in 2014. Prior to dating Christensen, Bilson and Brody were in a relationship for three years. Fans loved the real-life coupling of Seth and Summer, and the pair often appeared on the covers of magazines together. Despite their break-up, the former co-stars and partners have remained friends.
In 2019, Bilson and Brody ran into each other at the airport while travelling from New York to Los Angeles. “California here we come,” Bilson jokingly captioned a selfie of the twosome on her Instagram.
In 2009, Bilson was a victim of the much-publicised “Bling Ring”, a group of teenagers who used nascent location-tracking websites and tabloid publications to ascertain which celebrities were out of their homes, targeting their mansions for break-ins.
Stars including Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox and Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr were all victims of the group. Bilson was burgled five times in the space of a month, with the thieves making off with bags of clothes from Roberto Cavalli and Zac Posen, handbags and perfume from Chanel, and underwear. The Bling Ring dubbed this act of thievery “shopping”.
During one of their robberies, a member of the crew – also named Rachel – needed to use the bathroom.
“We were in Rachel (Bilson’s) bathroom and Rachel just had to go, so she just … yeah,” Nick, one of the ‘Bling Ring’ recalled to journalist Nancy Jo Sales in The Cut.
“I know I would never like … When you’re in there (robbing a house) you have a rush, like I’ve had to pee when I’ve been in there, but I would never use their bathroom, just in fear of that maybe some type of evidence would be left there. I think that’s weird, personally. But yeah, she did.”
More recently, Bilson starred in Hart Of Dixie, a Josh Schwartz-produced television series about a New Yorker who moves to a small town to become the local doctor when her dreams of becoming a high flying heart surgeon don’t work out. The series ran for four seasons before it was cancelled in 2015.
In 2017, Bilson starred in Nashville and last year appeared in TV movie Lovestruck. She is currently dating Bill Hader, the Saturday Night Live alumnus and creator of HBO series Barry.
The couple first met on the set of the 2013 romantic comedy The To-Do List, and reconnected years later at the 2019 InStyle awards. In January 2020, they made their red carpet debut at The Golden Globes.
They met at the @instyle Awards and you are welcome. 😠https://t.co/dPrQGqdV0W
— Laura Brown (@laurabrown99) January 6, 2020
ADAM BRODY
Many a girl’s first crush was The O.C.’s Seth Cohen, the loveable, anxious nerd who befriends bad boy Ryan and welcomes him into the Cohen family.
So much so that, rewatching The O.C. now, more than 15 years after the series first premiered, it’s cringe-worthy to see how the character of Seth was actually pretty problematic. (Remember when he named his boat after Summer? A girl he had never met or had an interaction with? Not cute. Actually kinda stalker-y.)
In real life, Adam Brody came to The O.C. off the back of another runaway teen success: Gilmore Girls.
In 2002, Brody played the onscreen love interest of Rory’s (Alexis Bledel) best friend Lane (Keiko Agena).
While The O.C. was still running, Brody threw himself into film, starring in Mr & Mrs Smith, Thank You For Smoking and In The Land Of Women. When the show was cancelled in 2007, he starred in horror films Jennifer’s Body and Scream 4, but there was often a long time between onscreen drinks for the actor.
More recently, Brody’s career has had an upswing, with a small role in the well-received comic book adaptation Shazam and a critically acclaimed turn in the 2019 horror film Ready Or Not.
In 2020, he stars alongside Carey Mulligan in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman.
If you thought Bilson and Brody’s relationship was the stuff of teen magazine dreams, wait till you hear who the actor ended up with.
In 2013, he started dating Leighton Meester, yes, that Leighton Meester, the star of The O.C.’s festival of hormones successor Gossip Girl.
Both Gossip Girl and The O.C. share DNA: they were created by teen series mastermind Josh Schwartz, and when Meester and Brody’s relationship became public, it was like two ’00s worlds were colliding.
The pair met on the set of The Oranges in 2011 and stayed in touch. The couple were married in 2014 and welcomed their first child the following year. Meester is currently pregnant with the family’s second baby.
OLIVIA WILDE
Remember Alex, the bisexual manager of The O.C.’s coolest club, who dated both Seth and Marissa over the course of the series? That role was played by Olivia Wilde, the actor now best known as the director of Booksmart.
Of all The O.C.’s alumnae, Wilde has one of the best post-series resumes, starring in House, Rush and Her, as well as writing and directing several projects.
Her next directorial project is Don’t Worry Darling, a psychological thriller starring Florence Pugh, Chris Pine and Shia LaBeouf.
She is married to actor Jason Sudeikis and the couple have two children.
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