Chris Pine's 'Emotionally Incapacitating' Acne Prevented Him From Being Cast in 'The O.C.'

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | May 13, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | May 13, 2024 |

The fall of 2023 was the 20th anniversary of the legendary teen drama The O.C., and former casting director Patrick Rush revealed in Welcome to The O.C.: An Oral History that Chris Pine was almost cast as Ryan Atwood, but lost his chance at the lead because of his skin problems. Last week, we learned that Pine had negative money in his bank account when he landed his big break, The Princess Diaries 2. Can you imagine how different things would have been if he’d starred opposite Adam Brody in The O.C. instead? The chemistry between those two would have been electric!

Pine responded to the comment during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week.

“The man didn’t have to talk about it. I mean, it’s his prerogative,” he said of the director’s comment. “I had awful skin as a teenager, and then after college, my skin started breaking out again. I was going out for The O.C. which is a teenage melodrama. I can understand that they wanted to have pretty people doing pretty things, and bad acne is not a key [to that].” Okay, this casting director and I are going to have some words.

He said he has “a little PTSD” from the situation, adding, “It’s no fun having bad skin…It was one of the most traumatic points of my life, but it is my story, man.”

“It’s so strange. People talk about obesity—and, obviously, I understand the difficulty of that—or they talk about any sorts of things, and I feel like acne is regarded as this thing of like, ‘Oh, it’s just like, what you go through as a teenager.’ And it can be … it can be kind of just like you get a pimple on your forehead. It can also be tremendously debilitating and really, seriously, emotionally incapacitating, which it was for me.”

He concluded with a hopeful message: “So, for anyone out there that is experiencing that: I get you, I hear you, I’ve been there, I know it. I know how depressing it can be and the kind of depths of sorrow it can drag you to, but there is a brighter day.”

I don’t want to jinx anything, but is Chris Pine in his Renaissance era? I’m here for it.