Why Mischa Barton's Marissa Cooper Left The O.C.

In the season 3 finale of the primetime teen soap "The O.C." — which aired on May 18, 2006 — viewers were absolutely shocked when Mischa Barton's lead character, Marissa Cooper, died in a fiery car crash. Within the narrative, Marissa's ex-boyfriend Kevin Volchok (Cam Gigandet) runs her car off the road while she's driving with her on-again, off-again love Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), and Marissa dies in Ryan's arms as their car catches fire behind them. Barton, who actually spoiled the twist shortly before the episode aired, stayed quiet about her reasons for leaving the series behind for quite some time, but in an exclusive interview with E! News in 2021, Barton finally spoke up about why she walked away.

"It's a bit complicated," Barton said, answering a question about when conversations began about her departure. "It started pretty early on because it had a lot to do with them adding Rachel [Bilson, who played Marissa's best friend Summer Roberts] in last minute as, after the first season, a series regular and evening out everybody's pay — and sort of general bullying from some of the men on set that kind of felt really s**tty," she said. "But, you know, I also loved the show and had to build up my own walls and ways of getting around, dealing with that and the fame that was thrust specifically at me." She added that when all of this added to the "amount of invasion" she was experiencing in her personal life as a result of her elevated fame, she "felt very unprotected." That's a more than reasonable explanation for wanting to leave.

Barton continued, making it clear that producers said they didn't have to kill Marissa:

"This has been said before, but they kind of gave me an option. The producers were like, 'Well, do you want your job and to sail off into the sunset and potentially you can come back in the future in some bizarre TV scenario or we can kill your character off and you can go on with your career that you want and what you want to do?' I was getting offers from big films at the time and having to turn them down. I had always been supporting in 'The Sixth Sense' and any of those things. My dream was to be offered those lead roles, so that's what happened. It just felt like it was the best thing for me and my health and just in terms of not really feeling protected by my cast and crew at that point."

According to Mischa Barton, things started to come apart at the seams during the show's second season. "So halfway through season 2 I would say, when we started doubling up on episodes and shooting [became] so much harder, and again a lot of that was too much for me," Barton said, which is a good point; "The O.C." ran for well over 20 episodes per season. "I didn't know where the character was going. I look back on it pretty fondly, but there's stuff I think people did wrong, and the way they handled it. So, I just didn't feel I could keep going."

Still, Barton has been an actor for a long time — as she mentioned, she showed up in "The Sixth Sense" as a child — so she was also clear about the fact that she wasn't afraid of hard work. "Nobody loves their job more than me," Barton clarified. "For me, acting is a passion and something I genuinely love, and it was something that I super enjoy, but also I can always see things for what they are in the business." Barton explained that she was raised with a strong understanding of the industry and that her parents were great about making her aware of the possible trappings. "Honestly, 15 years on [at the time], I do think it's sad that there wasn't a better way that it could've been handled."

Not only that, but Barton actually provided a positive outlook in the end, and she's right: Marissa got a huge, dramatic, over-the-top death that is, if nothing else, extremely memorable. "But I also do really love that she had this epic death and that it ended like that because it's memorable and it's not just another flash in the pan," Barton mused. "People still come up to me to this day and they're like, 'I remember where I was when your character died!' And they're still emotional about it, like it was really me. I think that that's cool that people actually took something away from it. There were lessons to be learned from Marissa, for better or for worse." Ultimately, "The O.C." got canceled after season 4, so maybe the lesson to be learned here was "don't kill off a main character."

Mischa Barton has made herself quite clear in regards to her exit from "The O.C.," but in 2023, the show's creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage spoke to Vanity Fair for the series' 20th anniversary and told a slightly different story. As Savage put it, producers told the show's creative team that they needed to do something huge in the season 3 finale so that season 4 could happen.

"We were under tremendous pressure to do something with that level of drama," Savage said. "Killing a series regular came down from the top. If we wanted a season four, we'd have to do something like that."

According to Schwartz, they actually regret killing her off as well. "Looking back on it, we wish we could have come up with a different solution," he admitted. "We didn't see an alternative path at the time, which is why we went down that road. But obviously in hindsight, there were lots of other ways we could have written the character off the show — and given Mischa the break that she needed and wanted — that still would've allowed for that character to return." Not only that, but Schwartz said that the fan outcry was particularly rough: "And when we saw the reaction after Marissa died from that audience, it did not feel good. It did not feel like that audience had been served or respected in the way that we always wanted and aimed to. Immediately, we had regret at that point."

10 years before that, Schwartz told The Daily Beast — as he celebrated a decade of the show — that Barton's exit was a complex matter. When he was asked why he killed Marissa, Schwartz said:

"It's a complicated, multifaceted question. It had as much to do with creatively feeling like this was always in the cards for this character and she was an inherently tragic heroine, and part of the Ryan/Marissa story was him trying to save her from a fate that she couldn't be rescued from, and part of it had to do with pressure from the network in terms of ratings, and what we could do for the show's fourth season. For a lot of critics, that character was a source of frustration. For a lot of audience members, that was their favorite character." 

To be fair to Schwartz, Barton hadn't spoken out about her exit yet, so perhaps he was trying to be respectful; in any case, it sure doesn't seem like everyone involved with Marissa Cooper's death was on the same page other than the fact that they all wish it had gone down differently. Also, "The O.C." got canceled after season 4, so there was no true happy ending here. 

"The O.C." is streaming on Hulu now.