Ian Somerhalder revealed in a new interview with E! News that he was forced to pay off an eight-figure debt (more than $10 million, although the exact figure was not given) after he retired from acting. Somerhalder said “financial turmoil” was one of the reasons he had to give up his lucrative television career. He made his name playing Boone Carlyle on four seasons of ABC’s “Lost” (two as a series regular and two as a special guest), and then became a sensation playing vampire Damon Salvatore on all eight seasons of The CW’s “The Vampire Diaries.”
“I retired from acting seven years ago,” Somerhalder recently told E! News while participating in the Manhattan Beach Beverage Forum. “I left an insanely lucrative career in television after a financial upheaval from building a business that I didn’t build properly. And the fraud put my wife and I in an eight-figure hole. Eight-figure holes are hard to climb out of. But Nikki (Reid) and I made it through. You know, she really negotiated us out of this deal, but we sold the house, the paintings, the car, the watch, everything.”
“I should have retired from one of the biggest TV shows in the world instead of starting a company that probably won’t get paid for the rest of my life,” the actor added.
Somerhalder married Twilight actor Nikki Reed in 2015. Somerhalder previously posted on Instagram that Reed helped her get out of a “real nightmare” while starring in The Vampire Diaries and building her company.
“This woman here decided she didn’t want to see her husband ruin her body, mind, and spirit, so she decided to pull up her thongs, get down in the trenches, team up to the negotiating table, and find a solution,” he wrote at the time. “She gave her life to get me out of that mess and almost died in the process. I’m here because of this woman.”
Somerhalder retired from acting in 2020 after the Netflix series “V Wars” was canceled. He later told People magazine that he was unlikely to pursue acting again as his Hollywood career was “in the rearview mirror.”
“I remember sitting down with my management team at the height of this and talking about this, saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to step away from this because I know this is the only thing that has supported my family,'” Somerhalder recalled of his decision to quit acting. “I say this in all humility, but I’d rather do that than be away from my family and be in some city for two months filming a TV show and dropping my family off and back. Once you get to a certain point, you’re like, ‘Okay, I want to focus on my family and the future of agriculture and food and energy and the big things.'” You don’t have to chase awards or chase things that make you feel good. ”
