Chris Pine, whose directorial debut “Poolman” comes out on Friday, admitted he was not pleased when a recent oral history about “The O.C.” featured casting director Patrick Rush speaking about his terrible acne from when he auditioned for the teen drama as a young actor.
Pine tried out for the lead role of Ryan Atwood on the Fox series, which ended up going to Benjamin McKenzie. He said on Thursday’s “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that he did experience some PTSD over the topic being brought up in the book.
“Is this PTSD, me bringing up a sour point?” podcast host Josh Horowitz of the book, “Welcome to the O.C.: The Oral History.”
“No — I mean, it’s a part of my life. Look, do I wish…? The man didn’t have to talk about it. I mean, it’s his prerogative,” said Pine.
He added, “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 a key [asset].”
Horowitz joked, “It’s a shame. iI you had gone on ‘The O.C., ‘your career might have worked out — you might have amounted to something.”
“I don’t want to say, ‘I’m grateful for not having landed [the part].’ I’m all right, but it is a little PTSD,” the actor said. “It’s no fun having bad skin… it was one of the most traumatic points of my life, but it is my story, man.”
Horowitz suggested that hearing how “big-time movie star” Chris Pine suffered with bad skin is encouraging to anyone currently in the same boat.
“Acne is regarded as, ‘Oh it’s just what you go through as a teenager,’ and it can be,” Pine said. “It can also be like tremendously debilitating, Like, really, seriously emotionally incapacitating, which it was for me.”
Pine added, “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,” the actor said, gesturing to the sun stetaming in through his window.
