Chris Pine reacts to The O.C. casting director who said he lost role due to his bad skin

Chris Pine would really love it if The O.C.’s casting director would stop bringing up how he lost out on a role in the teen drama because of his acne. 

In the 2023 book Welcome to the O.C.: The Oral History, casting director Patrick Rush revealed that Pine read for the part of Ryan Atwood and was “really good,” but that the show went in a different direction because the actor was “experiencing really bad skin problems” that “looked insurmountable,” the AV Club reported. Ben McKenzie eventually scored the role.

Pine was asked about Rush’s comments during a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “It’s a part of my life,” he said. “The man didn’t have to talk about it. I mean, it’s his prerogative.” 

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The Poolman star explained that he’d had “awful skin as a teenager” and began “breaking out again” shortly after graduating college. “Look, I was going out for The O.C., like a teenage melodrama,” he said. “I can understand why they wanted to have pretty people doing pretty things. And bad acne is not a key to [success].”

In response, host Josh Horowitz teased, “It’s a shame. If you had gone on The O.C., your career might have worked out.”

To which Pine replied, “I don’t want to say I’m grateful for not having landed the job, but I’m all right.” 

Still, Pine admitted, being reminded of how his breakouts caused him to lose the opportunity did give him “a little bit [of] PTSD.“

"It’s no fun having bad skin," he said. "It's no fun going to auditions when you have bad skin. It was one of the most traumatic points of my life, but it is my story."

He continued, "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 kind of just like you get a pimple on your forehead, [but] it can also be tremendously debilitating and really, seriously, emotionally incapacitating, which it was for me."

Pine concluded, “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."

Watch Pine discuss Rush’s comments about his O.C. audition in the clip above.