Mischa Barton Still Suffering ‘Trauma’ From Early Fame

Mischa Barton believes she is still suffering from “trauma” after shooting to fame as a teenager.

The 37-year-old actress landed her big break on hit TV show The O.C. when she was just 17 and she rose to international stardom during her early 20s, but Mischa believes she’s still scarred from the experience of becoming famous at a young age.

She told The Times newspaper: “You can go to therapy every day for the rest of your life, 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 went on to insist she would rather have stayed out of the spotlight, adding: “I don’t think I was fully prepared for that level of fame. Because it has never been something that I have sought out. I really would much rather be anonymous.”

She also said her dating life at that time was “weird” because she was dating men much older than her when she was just a teenager. She explained: “You do look back, and you were 18 dating 34-year-olds. With hindsight, you’re like, ‘Yeah, that was weird’.”

Mischa compared her experiences with the paparazzi to brutal movie series The Hunger Games and revealed she suffered issues with stalkers and online trolls during the rise of the internet. She added: “Nothing I did was good enough. It was the peak of cruelty about young women’s bodies. It was wild. People feel so entitled to you and your body and your image. It’s a strange feeling. It’s strange.”

It comes after Mischa made a return to TV with a guest role in rebooted Australian soap opera Neighbours. She played guest character Reece, an American new to Erinsborough, who is not quite who she appears to be and Mischa previously said she’s hoping to reprise the role after having such a great experience during filming.

Speaking at the launch of The Neighbours Experience in London last month, she said: “It’s very much open-ended at this point, so anything is possible!”