Did Netflix play a role in Ian Somerhalder stepping back from his acting career?
Ian Somerhalder is a showbiz A-lister, famous for making the world sign up for the Vampire Diaries fan club. But in the last few years, he has swapped acting for entrepreneurship, and it turns out Netflix may have played a role in that decision.
Nearly seven years after Somerhalder starred as Dr Luther Swan in the Netflix sci-fi series V Wars, he shared on the Haley on the Go podcast earlier this month why the stint pushed him to leave acting for good.
“I wanted to do V Wars because it was me, not as a vampire, it was me as a scientist,” Somerhalder explained. “Worked really hard on this thing for almost a year, and the show that got turned in wasn’t even watchable,” he said, without flinching.
Somerhalder was reportedly so discouraged by the initial cut of V Wars, which also featured Adriana Holmes, Jacky Lai, and Laura Vandervoort, that he wanted it to never air on Netflix.
“I said to the studio, ‘I don’t want to put my name on this. I’ll give you the money back. Literally, I’ll give you millions of dollars. I’ll give it back.’ And they were like, ‘What? What are you talking about? No, no, no,’” he recalled. While Somerhalder, who was also an executive producer on the show, finally persuaded the streamer to let him and his producing partner, James Gibb, reshoot, it came with its fair share of complications.
“We said we need creative control of the show and Netflix said, ‘Sure, we’re not giving you a dollar more,’” The Lost actor recounted. “And we were like, ‘No, you don’t understand. We need $10million to fix this show.’”
Although that was a shortcoming neither saw coming, in spite of it, Somerhalder shared he and Gibb managed to collect around $6million. What followed next was 10-12 days of non-stop shooting, which ultimately led Somerhalder to end up at a hospital due to “a full body shutdown.”
Even though V Wars was a project Somerhalder was particularly proud of, it was cancelled just after the first season. “You give everything, and then the show was a hit. The powers that be at Netflix were like, ‘This is unfortunate. This shouldn’t have happened. We can’t go back because that would set a precedent that would be terrible, so the show is done.’”
It was this moment that changed his outlook. “I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said to my wife, ‘I’m 40 years old, I don’t want to spend two years of my life doing something, working this hard, one year fully unpaid,” he continued. “I’m not gonna base my life on having television or streaming executives dictate how I can make a living. So, I pulled the plug. That was it. I walked away. I said, ‘I’m not gonna do this.’”