Ian Somerhalder revealed in a new interview with E! News that he was forced to claw himself and his family out of debt in the eight-figure range (an exact number was not given but it was $10 million or more) after he retired from acting. Somerhalder said “financial upheaval” is part of the reason he had to leave his lucrative television career behind. He gained prominence as 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 for playing the 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 attending Manhattan Beach’s Beverage Forum. “I left an insanely lucrative career in television after financial upheaval from building a business that I didn’t build properly. And due to fraud, it put my wife and I into an eight-figure hole. Eight figures is a hard hole to climb out of. But Nikki [Reed] and I did it. You know, she really negotiated us out of this deal but we sold houses, paintings, cars, watches, everything.”
“I should’ve been retiring off of one of the biggest TV shows in the world [instead of] starting companies that were not gonna pay me possibly ever,” the actor added.
Somerhalder has been married to “Twilight” actor Nikki Reed since 2015. He previously posted on Instagram that Reed helped get him out of a “true nightmare” as he was building a company while still starring on “The Vampire Diaries.”
“This woman here decided that she didn’t want to see her husband ruin his body/mind/spirit and pulled up her bootstraps and got down in the trenches assembling a team to get to the negotiating table to find a way out,” he wrote on at the time. “She devoted her life to getting me out of that mess and it almost killed her along the way. I am where I am BECAUSE of this woman.”
Somerhalder retired from acting after his Netflix series “V Wars” was canceled in 2020. He later told People magazine that acting again would be unlikely as his Hollywood career is “in the rearview mirror.”
“I remember sitting with my management talking about this, saying, ‘Hey, this is the only thing I’ve ever known that’s ever sustained my family, and I’m walking away from it,’ at this sort of peak,” Somerhalder remembered about his decision to stop acting. “I say this in all humility, in all respect, but I would much rather do this than go spend two months in some city, shooting a TV show away from my family or transporting my family back and forth. Once you reach a certain level, you’re like, ‘Okay, I want to focus on family and the future of farming and food and energy and the big things.’ I don’t need to chase awards and anything that would make me feel better about myself.”