Mischa Barton thinks it's time she gets her own docuseries

In 2019, Mischa Barton joined The Hills: New Beginnings. It was an extremely meta moment, given how The Hills is a spin-off of Laguna Beach, a reality show based on The O.C. It didn’t work out; Barton left after just one season. And in a new interview with The Guardian, she says producers expected her to act like her O.C. character, Marissa, instead of showing who she is. She claims that the producers even went as far as referring to her as Marissa.

Now Barton wants to show people who she really is outside of The O.C. and tabloids. She tells The Guardian that she plans to make a documentary series about her life, “finally from my perspective,” she says. She opens up about how the Britney Spears documentary Framing Britney Spears “really got to [her]” and made her think about how people still have a tabloid image of her. Barton says that like Spears, she openly struggled with mental health issues triggered by fame. Her desire to be in control of how she’s portrayed and tell her story in her own words is: “probably one of the main reasons why I think I’m going to do a docuseries.” For now, this is just an idea; there’s no deal set for the series yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if a major streaming platform gives Barton her own docuseries soon.

Recently, Barton’s been very open about her struggles with fame and the hidden challenges she faced while filming The O.C. In an interview with E!, she alleged she’d been bullied by some of the men on set (though she never specified if it was the producers and showrunner Josh Schwartz, or her castmates). She also said that producers gave her the option of leaving the show temporarily and returning when she felt comfortable doing so or killing off her character so she could freely go on to do other work. She chose the latter, thus The O.C.’s third season ending with Marissa’s gruesome death.