Paul Johansson was going through a tough time personally while playing the villainous Dan Scott on One Tree Hill. On the latest episode of the Trying to Figure It Out podcast, the actor behind the iconic character revealed that his mental health was "awful" as a result of playing the largely monstrous father to Nathan Scott (James Lafferty) and Lucas Scott (Chad Michael Murray).
"I was deeply depressed and I was drinking. As you can see over the series, I [went] from a lean, superstar basketball body to a guy that looks like he ate Dan Scott," Johansson, who played for the Canadian National basketball team before his OTH fame, said. "... It was because I was drinking a couple bottles of wine at night by myself in my house, sitting at the piano, trying to kind of figure out my life."
Johansson noted that "for about six or seven years, it was really tough."
"It was just a time when I think that I was absorbing the energy of the people that were looking at me, and seeing me, and seeing me as something that's bad and not good," he said. "I'm an actor. I'm thin-skinned. I'm sensitive. I'm vulnerable to criticism. I hurt a lot... I'm just too sensitive, so I absorbed a lot of that."
He also isolated himself from much of the show's cast for the sake of his role, at least in the beginning.
"A role like Dan, there are definitely moments when I'm on the set or around the younger actors that I'm particularly involved with that I tried, for the first couple of years, not to get too close to, because what would happen is the familiarity would breed a relaxed personality in the characters, which I didn't want," he explained. "I didn't think it would serve me, so what I wanted was a little bit of standoffishness. That wasn't mean or anything... I needed a quiet power."
While Johansson noted that people can't always tell that they're depressed, looking back, he knows the signs of his depression were clear.
"You stop working out. You stop returning phone calls. You sleep in," he said. "There's signs. It's not laziness, it's [because] your brain, it's beat up."
Johansson was only able "to get out of" his bad mental state when the show came to an end in 2012.
"I was actually grateful when it ended, because it had run its full course and it was time for it to end," he said. "I needed to get out and to get other characters and feel other things."
In the later years of the show and since it wrapped, Johansson's formerly "standoffish" relationship with the cast, which includes Sophia Bush, Bethany Joy Lenz and Hilarie Burton, turned into a deep friendship, as he revealed, "We were very close with each other. We're still on group texts right now, all of us, 10 years later, all the time. It's very sweet."
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