Mischa Barton was a poster girl for Noughties youth in The OC (Picture: Bros Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock)
As Marissa Cooper in California-set teen drama The OC, Mischa Barton was a poster girl for Noughties youth – so it’s funny to hear her say that she’s always felt out of step with her generation.
‘I’ve just always felt like I was from a completely different time and place, a completely different era,’ she explains to Metro.
That, she says, is why she particularly appreciates period roles these days – like her latest one, playing the old-school femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger in a new touring stage adaptation of James L Cain’s crime novel Double Indemnity.
Having been born in London before moving to America with her family as a young child, she is also enjoying being back in the UK for a stint.
‘Inside I feel very British, because in America, I always feel slightly more sarcastic than my peers. I just have this more British sense of humor, and I think it intrigues Americans, but they don’t fully understand where it comes from,’ she says.
A scheming 1930s housewife who conspires with her lover to murder her husband and collect on his life insurance policy, Phyllis is a truly iconic character, thanks to Barbara Stanwyck’s immortal portrayal of her in the classic 1944 film adaptation.
The actress is playing femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger in a new touring stage adaptation of James L Cain’s crime novel Double Indemnity
Mischa was born in London but moved to America as a young child (Picture: Getty)
Mischa believes Double Indemnity is a story that’s ripe for retelling now because once again ‘we’re living in a slightly broken world, I would say’.
In Double Indemnity, she continues, ‘they’ve just come out of the Great Depression, and there’s no money in anything. There is a lawlessness that you could equate to now – a desperation that people are feeling’.
Which might not sound like cheery stuff, but Mischa is having a lot of fun playing Phyllis – a devil who definitely gets the best tunes. ‘Women hate to be underestimated. And that’s the thing with Phyllis that she uses to her advantage – all these macho men underestimating her completely.’
It’s something Mischa can empathise with – because thanks to The OC’s outsized impact, she often doesn’t get credit for the sheer range of her career she’s had, on stage as well as screen.
‘I love to do theatre, and a lot of people don’t even know that was actually how I started out in New York. So yeah, I can relate to Phyllis in some ways – I don’t go around murdering people, though!’
Indeed, Mischa was just eight years old when she made her professional theatre debut off Broadway in a play by revered writer Tony Kushner.
Mischa is best known in her role as Marissa Cooper (Picture: Bros Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock)
But as soon as she started picking up screen roles in films like Lawn Dogs and The Sixth Sense, that part of her career stopped, she says, because back then ‘the theatre world was very closed off. It was a real no no to leave it and go do mainstream film. And The OC was the final nail in that coffin.’
When she started out in The OC, aged 17, she had no idea just what a cultural phenomenon it would become – and what she would have to endure.
In the past she has talked candidly about the distress she went through on and off set, explaining she felt ‘unprotected’ behind the scenes, which fed into her decision to leave the show at the end of the third season.
Subsequently, she suffered from breakdowns and PTSD that stemmed from her traumatic time in the glare of the media spotlight.
Today, however, she is somewhat more at peace with the past. ‘I think for a while there, I had some issues with the way certain things were handled.
‘Honestly, the fame was a lot to deal with. It was just a very different time in Los Angeles, where you were really being chased around by 20 paparazzi everywhere you went. But now I look back very fondly at all the great things that we went through and how lucky we were to be on a hit show. Not many people get to experience that.’
The actress has reached a more settled point in her life and career
She’s also glad that the show is now being discovered by a whole new cohort of Gen Z fans, for whom it represents – a little ironically perhaps, given Mischa’s own experiences – simpler times. ‘We weren’t living in this iPhone and Instagram age. It was still in the realm of “go meet up with your friends at the bottom of the driveway”.’
As for her post-OC career, Mischa admits it was a struggle for a while to escape the shadow of the series and she ‘had to turn a lot of things down that were very much in the same vein – where people just wanted Marissa 2.0’.
Among the highs were working with the late, great director Richard Attenborough and Shirley MacLaine on historical romance Chasing the Ring. Less enjoyable was her brief tenure on rebooted reality series The Hills in 2019. Appearing on screen as herself for once, she nevertheless found its contrivance discombobulating:
‘I didn’t really understand what [my castmates] were doing, because the camera would turn on and they just became like a completely different person, for entertainment purposes. It made me very uncomfortable actually.’
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Now aged 40, having dealt with the slings and arrows of the industry since childhood, she says she has reached a more settled point in her life and career than ever – something she credits in part to moving back to New York from LA, which she did ‘to be closer to the theatre and have a more grounded group of actors and friends around, because I felt LA had run its course for me’.
She’s recently had a hit playing florist turned amateur sleuth Miranda Green in her own murder mystery franchise, the third film of which is shooting this year. And looking ahead, you sense she’s relishing the chance to spread her wings further, finally unencumbered by pigeonholing.
‘There’s so many more representations of women in their 40s and 50s that are true to life now, not just playing the wife or the mother. It’s a wonderful progression that as you get older, you get these more layered characters. The bar is so much higher than it used to be.’
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Double Indemnity is at Devonshire Park, Eastbourne until Saturday [February 7], and Theatre Royal, Nottingham from Tuesday [February 10] until February 14, then touring the UK until May 9, doubleindemnityplay.co.uk
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